


this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time

by mayor_crumblepot



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: 1990s, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Happy Ending, Inspired by Fight Club, M/M, Self-Destruction, Suicide Themes, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, by inspired i mean... this is Fight Club, despite having edward as a narrator, i mean i guess, like nobody kills themselves but its a theme throughout the work, look fam i MADE it happen okay, meaning some very outdated technology and limitations, nobody has a good time even though they're all trying to act like they are, the riddler as his own independent character from ed, written in close third person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-05-30 12:25:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15096665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayor_crumblepot/pseuds/mayor_crumblepot
Summary: Edward hasn't felt like his life had purpose in years— his boss, Jim, isn't the worst person he's ever met, but he's also not the best. Everything about Edward's life grates on him, leaves him unable to sleep and ultimately unsatisfied. When he meets The Riddler, a charismatic soap salesman on an airplane, Edward's entire life shifts. He comes home to an apartment in flames, and The Riddler makes it his personal mission to remove Edward from his material shackles. And that means ensuring that Edward hits rock bottom.a retelling of the 1999 film Fight Club with The Riddler as Tyler Durden, Edward Nygma as The Narrator, and Oswald Cobblepot as Marla Singer, alongside an ensemble cast of side characters.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _italics are Edward's firsthand narrative observations_  
>  plain text is story progression
> 
> enjoy

_People are always asking me if I know The Riddler._

From the top story penthouse office of a skyscraper, Ed can’t enjoy the view past the gun that’s shoved in his mouth. In front of him, The Riddler holds the gun steady, missing his classic jacket but still looking unfairly put together, “Three minutes. This _is_ it! Ground zero,” he says, only resisting the urge to clap because he’s holding a gun. “Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?”

Ed tries, but ultimately fails to speak around the metal in his mouth. 

 _With a gun barrel between your teeth, you only speak in vowels._  

“I can’t think of anything,” he finally says, when the gun is removed. It leaves the taste of sweat and misery and pennies, but Ed welcomes the ability to simply speak, and close his jaw. 

_For a second, I totally forget about The Riddler’s whole controlled demolition thing, and I wonder how clean that gun is._

“It’s getting exciting now,” The Riddler strides over to the full-window wall, looking out over a quiet city. 

_That old saying, how you always hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways._

_We have front row seats to this theater of mass destruction. The demolitions committee of Project Mayhem wrapped the foundation columns of a dozen buildings with blasting gelatin. In two minutes, primary charges will blow base charges and a few square blocks will be reduced to smoldering rubble._

_I know this, because The Riddler knows this._

In front of the beautiful cityscape, The Riddler reaches into his pocket and pulls out a stopwatch. “Two and a half,” he announces, “think of everything we’ve accomplished.” 

_And suddenly, I realize that all of this— the gun, the bombs, the revolution— has something to do with a man named Oswald Cobblepot._

Ed is thrown back through time, through the remaining functioning parts of his mind, back to the unreasonably soft chest of another man. 

This man is not Oswald Cobblepot, though he may wish it were.

_Butch. Butch had bitch-tits._

_This was a support group for men with testicular cancer._

Throughout the room, pairs of men sob on one another. It’s not peaceful, comfortable crying, but rather ugly, so loud it goes quiet sobbing. Ed has the sound very well cataloged in his head. 

_The big moose of a man that was slobbering all over me— that was Butch._

Ed is not a short man by any regard. He’s nearing six feet, and despite his cripplingly low self esteem, he still stands tall. Yet, despite his towering height, he’s dwarfed by Butch. 

“We’re still men,” Butch says, holding Ed’s face into his chest, right over where his name tag is placed.

“Yes, we’re men,” Ed echoes him, empty. “Men is what we are.”

 _Eight months ago, Butch’s testicles were removed. Then hormone therapy. He developed bitch-tits because his testosterone was too high, and his body upped the estrogen in response. And that’s where I fit, right there in the middle, between these huge, sweating tits that hung enormous, the way you’d think of God’s as big._  

“They’re gonna have to open up my pecs again and drain the fluid,” Butch disengages from Ed for a moment, looking down at him as though it isn’t unusual. “Okay. You cry now.”

_No, wait. Back up. Let me start earlier._

Again, through space and time, Ed hurtles. 

In a bed of plush green pillows and various blankets, he stares at the wall, eyes like two holes in the snow. 

_For six months, I couldn’t sleep._

At work, Ed stares at a copier as it runs, over and over and over and over— he blinks awake when the light becomes too much. 

_With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy._

The people in front of him flash, some truly there and some simply supplied by his struggling mind. Everything smells like burnt coffee and copy toner, every chime of a desk phone hurts down to the very meat of his brain. 

_When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything— the IBM Stellarsphere, the Wayne Galaxy, planet Microsoft._

Ed stares at the trash in the can from his tiny corner cubicle, rubbing his temples as if that’s all it will take to push the pain away. 

His boss, a man who truly does see the best in Ed, comes striding in and uses his desk as a chair. “Gonna need you out of town a little more this week,” Jim explains, flipping through a folder to ensure that everything’s there, “we got some red flags to cover.”

_It must have been Tuesday. He was wearing his cornflower-blue tie._

“You want me to de-prioritize my current reports—“

“Yeah.”

“—until you advise of a status upgrade?”

“Make these your primary action items,” Jim sets the folders down on the desktop. “Here’s your flight coupons. Call me if there’s any trouble,” and he leaves with a smile that actually just might meet his eyes.

_He was full of pep. Must have had his grande latte enema._

In his apartment, Ed walks around in his boxers and listens to the sweet sound of nothing. In the bathroom, where everything matches, he sits on the toilet with an Ikea catalog in his hands and the phone wedged to his ear. 

_Like so many others, I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct._

“Uh, yes,” Ed speaks too quietly, as if he were actually in a public restroom and not his own home, “I’d like to order the Erika Pekkari dust ruffles.”

_If I saw something clever, like a little coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, I had to have it. The Klipske personal office unit, the Hovetrekke home exer-bike, or the Johannshamn sofa with the Strinne green stripe pattern. Even the Rizlampa wire lamps of environmentally friendly unbleached paper._

_I’d flip through catalogs and wonder: What kind of dining set defines me as a person?_

_I had it all— even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof that they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working, indigenous peoples of—_

“Please hold,” the voice on the phone says, for the third time since Ed has left his bathroom. He stares into the wasteland that is the inside of his fridge, considers the moldy bread and the empty space between it and a jar of peanut butter. In the door, there’s various different kinds of mustard, one of which he picks up. 

“I was holding,” he says, using a knife to scrape mustard out of the jar and eat it. 

_People used to read pornography, now it’s the Horchow collection._

Days later, in a clinic that smells more like urine that it rightfully should, Ed stares down a doctor who clearly hates his life more than Ed hates his own. “No, you can’t die from insomnia,” he says, taking Ed’s obvious melodrama as an opportunity to condescend.

“What about narcolepsy?” Ed tries, clutching the edge of the examination bed desperately, “I nod off. I wake up in strange places. I have no idea how I got there.”

“You need to lighten up.”

“Can you please just get me something?” He knows where this goes, how it sounds, but he tries. 

_Red and blue Tuenols, lipstick-red Seconals._

The doctor eyes Ed’s bouncing knee, his frantic twitching fingertips. “No,” he says, almost happily, “you need healthy, natural sleep. Chew some valerian root and get more exercise.”

Ed stands up to follow the doctor as he walks away, barely any purpose on his step. “Hey, come on,” his voice wavers just like his hands do, “I’m in pain.” 

“You wanna see pain? Swing by First Methodist on Tuesday nights. See the guys with testicular cancer. That’s pain.”

The last thing Ed cares about is comparative suffering, but he decides if he’s not going to be sleeping, he might as well see just how bad things truly are for the Tuesday night First Methodist crowd. 

Up the stairs and past the practicing children’s choir, Ed finds a group of men sitting in foldable chairs, and a sign that reads “Remaining Men Together,” so he knows he’s in the right place. 

When everything gets going, they talk. 

“I always wanted three kids—“ a man whose name tag says Thomas tries not to sound like he wants to cry, “two boys and a girl. Mindy wanted two girls and a boy,” as he talks, Ed applies his own name tag to his chest, the name Cornelius written in perfect handwriting that makes it seem like it isn’t a lie, “we never could agree on anything. Well, uh, you know, she— She had her first child last week, a— a girl! With her, uh— With her new husband.” Thomas struggles, mutters obscenities beneath his breath but soldiers on, “And— And thank god, you know? I’m glad for her. Because she de-des—deserves it.” For Thomas, all of his effort is for nothing, as he starts to cry and lose his composure. 

“Everyone,” the head of the circle stands, putting his hands on Thomas’ shoulders, “let’s thank Thomas for sharing himself with us.”

“Thank you, Thomas,” the circle says with varying levels of interest. 

“I look around this room, and I see lots of courage, and that gives me strength. We give each other strength,” he sounds very much like he could have been a pastor, or maybe had been before he’d lost what he perceived to be his manhood. “It’s time for the one-on-ones. So let’s all of us here follow Thomas’,” from his chair, Thomas is still sobbing, still holding up just the image he was trying to avoid, “good example, and really open ourselves up. Would you find a partner, please?”

Stricken with discomfort and fear, Ed stays rooted to his folding chair. People aren’t something he’s good with, never has been. 

_And this is how I met the big moose. His eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears. Knees together. Those awkward, little steps._

Butch comes over to Ed without being prompted, simply decides that Ed is good enough. He pulls Ed out of his chair through a handshake, completely unaware of the discomfort Ed is feeling. “My name is Butch,” he says, voice far too small for someone as big as he is. 

“Butch—“ Ed is swallowed up by a crushing hug and Butch crying into his shoulder. 

_Butch had been a champion bodybuilder. You know that chest-expansion program you see on late-night TV? That was his idea._

“I was a juicer,” Butch speaks in whispers, like Ed alone in his bathroom, “you know. Using steroids. Diabonal and Wistrol. They use that shit on racehorses, for Christ’s sake,” as he talks, Butch moves his hands idly over the frail expanse of Ed’s back, “and now I’m bankrupt. I’m divorced. My two grown kids won’t even return my phone calls.”

_Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one._

“Go ahead,” he looks down at Ed’s fake name tag, “Cornelius. You can cry.”

Ed shakes his head, doesn’t speak, simply denies the offer as best he can. Of course, Butch doesn’t hear it, he just guides Ed down into his overgrown chest and holds him there. 

For a moment, Ed considers letting himself suffocate there, just die in the arms of a moose of a man, but then. Then he starts to cry. 

_And then, something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom._

Later that same night, Ed is sprawled out in his bed, all spidery limbs and loud snores.

_Babies don’t sleep this well._

When he returns to the church, Ed takes the whole calendar lineup of support groups. Instead of copying the dates and times down, he simply rips the paper from the bulletin board and shoves it into his pocket. 

_I became addicted. If I didn’t say anything, people assumed the worst. They cried harder, then I cried harder._

At work, Ed circles the support group listings in the newspaper, even goes so far as to write out a schedule to ensure he’s making the best of his time. 

Some groups are better than others. Some are held in gymnasiums, some don’t even have chairs. Or, like the one Ed is at now, they’re held in auditoriums with comfortable seats, and someone brings donuts and doesn’t burn the coffee. 

“Now, we’re going to open the green door— the heart chakra,” a woman speaks from a podium and Ed sits in the middle of the crowd, eyes closed, mostly at peace.

_I wasn’t really dying. I wasn’t host to cancer or parasites. I was the warm little center that the life of this world crowded around._

“Imagine your pain,” the woman says, “as a white ball of healing light. It moves over your body, healing you. Now keep this going. Remember to breathe, and step forward through the back door of the room. Where does it lead? To your cave.”

Inside Ed’s mind, the cave is icy and white, filled with blue accents and full of echoes. 

“Step forward into your cave,” the woman’s voice barely reaches him as Ed envisions himself walking around. “That’s right. You’re going deeper into your cave,” Ed walks over ice formations, touches the walls but doesn’t feel the cold, simply knows it’s there, “and you’re going to find your power animal.”

From deep inside his cave, Ed hears tiny feet tapping at the icy ground. He considers his options, thinks about what could possibly be waiting for him. Maybe an alligator? Perhaps a lion? Definitely a predator. 

He hears the offbeat steps and frowns when the animal finally comes into view.

A penguin. An emperor penguin, of course, with the trademark yellow around its head and perfect little chubby stomach. “Slide,” it tells him, voice harsh and almost unnerving. Ed gives the penguin a look, frowning as his head slowly tilts further and further to one side. 

The penguin laughs and flops onto its stomach, sliding away and out of the cave. Ed leaves the support group that night confused, but that doesn’t deter him.

_Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again. Resurrected. Butch loved me because he thought my testicles were removed too. Being there, pressed against his tits, ready to cry. It was my vacation._

The off-balance footsteps can be heard from the stairwell, and from his place in Butch’s chest, Ed stares, waiting to see the source. In walks a man with over-styled hair and the ugliest fake-fur coat Ed has ever seen in his life, wearing circular sunglasses and smoking a cigarette.

_And he ruined everything._

“This is cancer, right?” he asks, blowing smoke out of his nose. 

This fuck, _Oswald Cobblepot, did not have testicular cancer. He was a liar. He had no diseases at all. I had seen him at Free and Clear, my blood parasites group on Thursdays. Then at Hope, my bimonthly sickle-cell circle. And again at Seize the Day, my tuberculosis Friday night._

_Oswald, the big tourist. His lie reflected my lie, and suddenly, I felt nothing. I couldn’t cry. So once again, I couldn’t sleep._

Ed leaves the church, nearly tripping over the doorway, only to find Oswald walking away down the darkest possible alleyway, cigarette glued to his lips as if he hadn’t been chain-smoking the whole evening. 

 _Next group, after guided meditation, after we open our heart chakras, when it’s time to hug, I’m gonna grab that little bitch Oswald Cobblepot and scream_ — “Oswald, you liar! You big tourist! I need this! Now get out!” — _I hadn’t slept in four days._

In the middle of the night, sometimes Ed travels from his bed to his couch, thinking that perhaps a change of scenery may save him from his lack of sleep. It rarely works. 

_When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake._

Despite his desperate need for sleep, Ed splays himself out on the couch and watches infomercials with dead eyes. His mouth hangs open, his glasses sitting out of line with his eyes; he doesn’t sleep. 

Back at group, the woman who usually guides meditation brings up a member of the group, Chloe, to speak. She’s frail and holds onto the podium for balance, the scarf she has wrapped around her bald head seems almost too heavy for her.

_Oh, yeah. Chloe. Chloe looked the way Meryl Streep’s skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around the party being extra nice to everybody._

“Well, I’m still here,” Chloe says, pausing for the laughter that doesn’t come, “but I don’t know for how long. That’s as much certainty as anyone can give me. But I’ve got some good news,” whenever Chloe expresses an emotion, her entire face changes with it, not just her lips or her eyes. “I no longer have any fear of death,” the meditation leader claps, and so do some of the people in the crowd, “but I am in a pretty lonely place. No one will have sex with me,” as Chloe continues to speak, her voice gets louder as she leans closer to the microphone. “I’m so close to the end and all I want is to get laid for the last time. I have pornographic movies in my apartment and lubricants and amyl nitrate and—“

“Thank you, Chloe,” the meditation leader has to practically yell, but she disengages Chloe from the microphone, finally. “Everyone, let’s thank Chloe.”

“Thank you, Chloe,” the group says, although varyingly unnerved. One row behind Ed, at the opposite end of the row of seats, Oswald chokes on his cigarette smoke. 

“Now, let’s ready ourselves for guided meditation,” the leader does a bit of a shiver, as if to expel the uncomfortable air within the room. “You’re standing at the entrance of your cave. You step inside your cave, and you walk.”

_If I did have a tumor, I’d name it Oswald. Oswald— the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can’t._

“Step deeper into your cave as you walk,” she continues, “you feel the healing energy of this place all around you. Now find your power animal.”

Just as he had last week, Ed follows the cold turns and slopes of the cave within his mind, touches the frozen walls that can’t truly hurt him. He looks for the penguin from before, looks for the cute little chubby creature that he’s come to be moderately appreciative of. 

Instead, he finds Oswald, sitting on what looks like a throne of ice, smoking like he’s in the back seat of a taxi and not invading Ed’s brain. “Slide,” Oswald tells him, the same voice as the penguin had used but somehow so much more unnerving.

Ed pulls out of his own mind and opens his eyes, looking at Oswald with unguarded suspicion. 

“Okay. Now, let’s partner up. Pick someone special to you tonight,” the woman says, leaving Ed to wander off and find Oswald by the coffee, grabbing the smaller man by the crook of his arm with nothing but a quiet greeting. 

“We need to talk,” he tells Oswald, sounding much more imposing than he looks in his windbreaker and sunken eyes. 

“Sure,” Oswald says, letting go of the lever on the coffee pot only to see he’s overfilled his cup. He leaves the cup there, giving it a parting look of sorrow. 

“I’m onto you.”

“What?” When he looks down at the grip Ed has on his arm, Oswald can’t help but grin. 

“Yeah. You’re a faker. You’re not dying.” Ed points at Oswald as if to drive the accusation home, and he feels like he’s done a good job.

“Sorry?”

“In the Tibetan philosophy, Sylvia Plath sense of the word, I know we’re all—“ for a split second, Ed gets distracted by a single smear of eyeliner that has traveled away from Oswald’s eye and onto his cheekbone, “we’re all dying, alright? But you’re not dying the way Chloe back there is dying.” 

After taking his time to consider Ed and the varying aspects of his face, Oswald lowers his guard just the smallest bit, “So?”

“So you’re a tourist, okay? I’ve seen you,” coming back to the script he’d created in his head gives Ed a new sense of confidence, “I saw you— saw you at melanoma. Saw you at tuberculosis. I saw you at testicular cancer. I saw—“

“I saw you practicing this,” Oswald takes a drag off of his cigarette and has the audacity to look at Ed fondly.

“Practicing what?”

“Telling me off,” the smoke blows out of Oswald’s nose and Ed has to force himself not to cough. “Is it going as well as you hoped,” Oswald leans to look at Ed’s name tag and the obviously fake name he’s put on it, “Rupert?” 

“I’ll expose you.”

“Go ahead, I’ll expose you.”

“Okay,” the meditation leader comes through the room, bringing with her the same practiced cadence she uses when she guides them, “come together. Let yourselves cry.”

Ed looks ready to bolt, aware that he definitely looks like a bad person, grousing with a frail looking man at a support group. Oswald closes in quickly, wrapping his arms around Ed’s middle and placing his head on the taller man’s shoulder. Even as Oswald pretends to cry, Ed has no choice but to let him, lest he make a scene. 

“Oh, god, why are you doing this?” While he tries to inject a harsh edge to his voice, Ed can’t help but sound terrified. 

“It’s cheaper than a movie, and there’s free coffee,” Oswald explains, stopping his crying to ash his cigarette and make himself a little more comfortable on Ed’s shoulder. 

“No, look,” he tries to sound less terrified, bringing his voice down to a near whisper. “This is important, okay? These are my groups. I’ve been coming here for over a year.”

“Why do you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Ed says, back on a subject he feels a little more comfortable talking about, “when people think you’re dying, man, they really, really listen to you instead of just—“

“Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak?” Oswald finishes the thought Ed had begun to believe only he had perfectly, leaving him more than a little impressed.

“Yeah,” he says, raising his eyebrows and letting Oswald shift his weight, “yeah.”

“Show yourself,” the meditation leader comes by, unnerving now that she’s so close, “completely.”

Oswald lets out the smallest and most emotionally vulnerable whine to make the woman walk away, to show that they really are sharing.

“Look,” Ed starts once the woman is gone, “you don’t want to get into this. It becomes an addiction.”

“Really?” Oswald could not care less. 

“I’m serious,” with one simple motion, Ed disengages them and instead holds onto Oswald’s non-cigarette-holding hand, “I can’t cry if there’s another faker present, and I need this. So you’ve got to find somewhere else to go.”

“Candy-stripe a cancer ward,” Oswald says, now more than a little haughty as he looks up at Ed. “It’s not my problem.” With that, he leaves, hiking a jacket up over his shoulders on his way out. 

Ed looks dumbfounded before following, a good fifteen paces behind but easily catching up and following Oswald as he goes down the street. “Wait, wait— Wait a second. Hold on. Listen. We’re gonna split up the week, okay?” Bargaining with Ed is like listening to a child beg for a later bedtime, it’s obvious that he’s so desperate he’ll take whatever he can get. “You take lymphoma and tuberculosis—“

“No, you take tuberculosis. My smoking doesn’t go over at all.”

“Okay. Good. Fine,” Ed tries a smile, surprised at how well this is turning out. “Then, by that logic, I should be taking lung cancer, too.” 

“Oh, no. I think I’ve earned that one. I’ve got the black lungs, here,” Oswald flicks a cigarette over Ed’s shoulder, doesn’t look to see where it lands as he walks inside a laundromat. 

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t know. Am I?” 

Ed follows Oswald into the laundromat and watches as he considers each drum of clothes, “What do you want?” 

“I’ll take the parasites,” Oswald opens up a drum of clothes as Ed continues to talk.

“You can’t have both the parasites, but why don’t you take the blood parasites—“

“I want brain parasites,” he goes to another drum, leaving some behind in the first.

“Fine, I’ll take blood parasites, but I’m gonna take the organic brain dementia, okay?” As if he’s chastising a child, Ed wags his finger and raises his voice. 

“I want that.”

“You can’t have the whole brain!”

“So far, you have four. I only have two.” Oswald stares Ed down with an armful of jeans, head held high to make up for their difference in height. 

“Take both the parasites. They’re yours. New we both have three—“ as soon as they’ve come to an agreement, Oswald stalks out of the laundromat with clothes under his arm. Ed follows after him, calling from the doorway, “Hey, you left half your clothes!”

Oswald continues to walk, ignoring Ed completely as he crosses a busy street. Cars honk and squeal to get around him, but Oswald continues to walk. Timidly, Ed tries to follow and nearly gets hit twice, but manages to make it across and follow Oswald into the consignment shop he’s entered. When he sees Oswald pushing the jeans across the counter, he rolls his eyes. 

“What, are you selling those?” Ed tries an attitude with Oswald but is caught with a foot slamming down on top of his.

“Yes! I’m selling some clothes.” As Ed flounders in the pain, Oswald steamrolls through it, “So. We each have three, that makes six. What about the seventh day? I want ascending bowel cancer.”

_The man had done his homework._

“Thank you,” Oswald takes the money from the woman at the register with a smile that almost stops Ed.

“No, no. I want bowel cancer.” The woman at the register gives Ed a look but simply goes back to her notes just as quick. 

“That’s your favorite too? Tried to slip it by me?” The way Oswald looks at Ed, as if he understands everything going through Ed’s mind at any given moment; it infuriates Ed to no end. 

“Look—“ Ed gives up, defeat written across his face, “We’re gonna split it, okay? Take the first and third Sunday of the month.”

Oswald looks through Ed, and then looks him over. His eyes linger on Ed’s shoes, his belt, and the messy bangs that hang into his eyes and over his glasses. “Deal,” he says, sticking out his hand, which Ed shakes and continues to shake, unrelenting, “looks like this is goodbye.”

“Well, let’s not make a big thing out of it, okay?”

“How’s this for not making a big thing?” Not even before he’s finished his sentence, Oswald is walking out of the shop and into the street once more. Desperately, Ed follows. 

“Hey, Oswald,” he tries, speaking up when he sees Oswald in the middle of the street, cars whizzing around him as he walks, “Oswald!” Unafraid of anything around him, Oswald turns around and stops still in the street. “May-maybe we should exchange numbers.”

“Should we?”

“We might want to switch nights,” Ed knows that explanation is flimsy, and he hopes that the spineless tone in his voice doesn’t give him away completely. 

“Okay,” Oswald says as if it’s nothing, walking right back through the mess of cars. 

As Oswald walks back to him, Ed scribbles down his phone number onto someone else’s business card. Oswald takes the card and the pen Ed had used, and writes his own number onto a scrap of paper, humming as he goes. 

_This is how I met Oswald Cobblepot. Oswald’s philosophy of life was that he might die at any moment. The tragedy, he said, was that he didn’t._

Once again, Oswald turns around halfway through the street, “It doesn’t have your name,” he calls back, “who are you? Cornelius? Rupert? Travis? Any of the stupid names you give each night?” 

A bus passes in front of Oswald and Ed gets to escape the prying question.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll be updating this every day, assuming i don't get hit by a car or something. that ideally has this fic being complete by the third of july. so, see y'all _then_ for a monster author's note at the end! 
> 
> for now? i'll just say thanks for reading!
> 
> talk to me on tumblr! i'm [ mayor-crumblepot ](https://mayor-crumblepot.tumblr.com)


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up in an airplane, jostled awake by turbulence and the too-strong perfume of a woman sitting next to him. 

_You wake up at Sea-Tac, S.F.O, L.A.X. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, B.W.I, pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour._

Ed desperately runs across an airport terminal, frantic and overwhelmed, tie loose, and shoves his boarding pass to a woman behind a counter. 

“Check-in for that flight doesn’t begin for another two hours, sir,” though her tone holds a bit of mocking, she lightens up when she sees just how confused Ed is. He steps back to look at the clock over the counter and then back to his watch.

_This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time._

_You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?_

_Everywhere I travel— tiny life. Single-serving sugar. Single-serving cream. Single pad of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos. Sample package mouthwash. Tiny bars of soap._

_And the people I meet on each flight, they’re single-serving friends. Between takeoff and landing, we have our time together, but that’s all we get._

In some city he’s forgotten the name of, Ed walks into a warehouse with a single burned out car inside. When the doors are opened, he gets hit with the distinct smell of fire— burned rubber and ash, plus something that smells suspiciously like a barbecue pit. That would be the burnt flesh, probably. 

_On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. I was a recall coordinator. My job was to apply the formula._

The men who entered the warehouse with him start talking to Ed, pointing out things on the vehicle. “Here’s where the infant went through the windshield. Three points,” the first man jokes, voice flat. 

_A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up._

The other man makes a sound of interest as he looks through the back passenger window, careful not to be in any of the pictures Ed is taking. “The teenager’s braces are wrapped around the backseat ashtray,” this man’s eyes are sunken like Ed’s are, terrifyingly recessed in his pale, sweaty face. “Might make a good antismoking ad.”

_The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall?_

Ed wanders up to the front of the car, meeting the first man, who has yet to get too close to the car itself. “The father must’ve been huge,” he says, gesturing to the seat with his pen, “you see where the fat’s been burned to the seat? The polyester shirt? Very—“ he struggles for a moment before chuckling, “modern art.”

_Take the number of vehicles in the field, “A,” multiply it by the probability rate of failure, “B,” then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, “C.”_

In the seat of an airplane, Ed continues his explanation to an older woman, “ ‘A,’ times ‘B,’ times ‘C,’ equals ‘X.’ If ‘X’ is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”

The woman beside him looks horrified, but tries not to put it all on her face. “Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?”

“You wouldn’t believe.”

“Which car company do you work for?” the woman tries, failing to make her question sound casual by any means.

“A major one.” 

Ed looks back to the notes in front of him, coming nowhere near focusing on them but still, turning his face toward them. 

_Every time the plane banked too sharply on takeoff or landing, I prayed for a crash or a midair collision. Anything._

In his mind’s eye, Ed imagines another plane coming into direct contact with the one he’s on, tearing a hole into the middle of the cabin, at the beginning of the seats. He watches bodies shred, watches luggage scatter and feels the stinging sensation of wind across his cheeks. Although he’s never heard screaming of the magnitude he’s sure would accompany a plane crash, he tries to fabricate it as best he can. 

 _Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip._  

He wakes up on another plane, next to another person. 

“If you are seated in an emergency exit row—“ the man next to Ed reads, cadence far too comfortable and strong, pausing only to check if he is, indeed, in an emergency exit row, “Yeah. And you feel you would be unable or unwilling to perform the duties listed on the safety card, please ask a flight attendant to reseat you.” 

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Ed quips, looking over the man’s perfect suit, shimmering green with a beautiful tie to match it.

“Wanna switch seats?”

“No. I’m not sure I’m the man for that particular job,” while he wants to laugh, Ed can’t really bring himself to. He knows that if push came to shove, he probably wouldn’t run through the exit door procedure, just to see what might happen.

“An exit-door procedure at 30,000 feet. The illusion of safety,” as if concerned, the man looks over the back of his seat and then shifts just enough to see over the one in front of him.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?”

“So you can breathe,” Ed says, as if he knows everything. 

“Oxygen gets you high,” the man argues, shaking his head. “In a catastrophic emergency, you’re taking giant, panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It’s all right here,” he explains, pushing the emergency pamphlet into Ed’s clammy hands. “Emergency water landing— 600 miles an hour,” the man points to the faces on the pamphlet, “Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.”

“That’s, um—“ Ed searches for words, handing the little folded paper back, “that’s an interesting theory.” After giving a small laugh and trying not to be envious of how this man’s hair obviously cooperates when he puts it into a cleaned up style, Ed tries again. “What do you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Why?” Despite sounding aggressive, the man has a smile on his face. “So you can pretend like you’re interested?”

The nervous laugh that leaves Ed is downright embarrassing, “Okay.”

“You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh,” the man says, leaning forward and reaching for his briefcase from beneath the seat in front of him. 

“We have the same exact briefcase,” Ed observes, smiling.

The man smiles, but doesn’t comment, simply powers on, “Soap.”

“Sorry?”

“I make and I sell soap,” he explains, opening up the briefcase and showing off some beautifully wrapped bars of soap. The smell that comes out of the briefcase is heavenly, and Ed has to keep himself from leaning forward to catch better hits of it. The man reaches into the top pocket of the briefcase and hands Ed a card, “The yardstick of civilization.” 

_And this is how I met—_

“The Riddler?” Ed considers the card for a long moment, almost in disbelief. “That’s a strange name.”

“It’s a nickname that stuck. Sometimes, people real close call me Riddles,” he blows Ed off with a casualty that implies he gets questions of his name all the time, this leads Ed to believe him. “Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate, you can make napalm?”

“No,” Ed finds himself admitting, shaking his head, “I did not know that. Is that true?”

“That’s right. One can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items,” the tone in The Riddler’s voice almost sounds like that of someone on a late-night infomercial.

“Really?”

“If one were so inclined,” he closes his briefcase and slides it back to the floor. 

“Riddles, you are by far the most interesting ‘single-serving’ friend I’ve ever met.” The Riddler looks at Ed over his sunglasses, gives him a long, unwavering stare. “See, I have this thing— Everything on a plane is single-serving, even—“

“Oh, I get it,” The Riddler stops him, breaking just the smallest smile, “It’s very clever.”

“Well, thank you.” Ed beams under the praise, something he rarely gets from the people around him. 

“How’s that working out for you?”

“What?”

“Being clever.”

“Great.” The question is so out of left-field that Ed isn’t entirely sure if he’s answering it truthfully, but it’s not like he’d admit failure to a complete stranger. 

“Keep it up, then,” The Riddler stands up from his seat, eyeing the bathroom, “keep it right up.” He takes his suitcase with him as he rises, moving slowly past Ed in the aisle seat, “Ah, now a question of etiquette. As I pass, do I give you the ass, or the crotch?” It seems he goes with ass, easily squeezing by. 

_How I came to live with The Riddler is— Airlines have this policy about vibrating luggage._

In the airport of Gotham, Ed stares at the now empty luggage carousel. He’s been waiting for hours, listening to the same series of announcements over the P.A. system, too loud to be clear to be understood. He approaches the counter once again, holding his briefcase in hand. 

“Was— Was it ticking?” He asks the man reclined there, holding a silent phone to his ear. 

“Actually, throwers don’t worry about ticking,” the man explains, making no effort to move from his comfortable position, as if he’s watching a football game in his own home, “‘cause modern bombs don’t tick.”

“Sorry. ‘Throwers’?” 

“Baggage handlers,” he sighs, as if everyone should know this information. “But, when a suitcase vibrates, then the thrower’s gotta call the police.”

“My suitcase,” Ed starts, incredulous, “was vibrating?”

“Nine times out of ten, it’s an electric razor, but every once in a while—“ the man leans forward, covering the mouth of the phone that’s been up to his ear, “it’s a dildo. Of course,” he leans back again, grinning, “it’s company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. We have to use the indefinite article— ‘A’ dildo. Never ‘your’ dildo.”

“I don’t own—“ Before Ed can even try to defend himself, the man behind the counter holds up a hand and acts like there’s something he should be listening to on the other end of the phone. 

 _I had everything in that suitcase. My CK shirts, my DKNY shoes, my AX ties._  

Outside the window, The Riddler tosses his suitcase into the back of a luxury car and hops the door to sit inside. He peels out, driving the car as if he’s always owned it, from the day he started driving. 

_Never mind._

As Ed comes up on his apartment building in the back of a taxi, tired and still without his suitcase, he’s met with police and emergency vehicles. They’re not there for him, why would they be, but they are there for his apartment. 

_Home was a condo on the 15th floor of a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The walls were solid concrete. A foot of concrete’s important when your next-door neighbor lets her hearing aid go and has to watch game shows at full volume. Or when a volcanic blast and debris that used to be your furniture and personal effects blows out of your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails, flaming, into the night._

_I suppose these things happen._

Ed knows it’s his apartment scattered across the pavement from the first look at the debris everywhere. He see the Ikea furniture, the doors to his fancy cabinetry, he sees it all. Despite that, he walks up to the doors of the building as if maybe, maybe there’s a chance it isn’t all his. 

“There’s nothing up there,” the doorman tells him, regretful. “You can’t go into the unit. Police orders,” Ed waves to the man he’s known for so long, shell shocked, “Do you have somebody you can call?” 

_How embarrassing. A house full of condiments and no food._

Among the rubble of his fridge and his couch, Ed sees the singed pieces of the paper that Oswald wrote his phone number on, so many weeks ago. He considers it, and finds it to be a viable option. 

_The police would later tell me that the pilot light might have gone out, letting out just a little bit of gas. That gas could have slowly filled the condo— 1,700 square feet with high ceilings for days and days. Then the refrigerator’s compressor could’ve clicked on._

Ed takes himself to the payphone outside of his building and dials Oswald’s number, lets the line ring until finally, it gets picked up. 

“Yeah?” Oswald’s voice is smaller on the phone, almost delicate. Ed can’t find it in himself to speak, still horrified by the realization that all of the fire that he smells is coming off of what he used to own. “I can hear you breathing, you—“ Ed hangs up the phone. 

Ed dives back into his pocket for coins but finds The Riddler’s card there among the change. He looks it over for a number, before finally making a decision. 

_If you asked me now, I couldn’t tell you why I called him._

The line rings and rings, until the ringing seems like it’s gone on for far too long and Ed gives up. He puts the phone back on the cradle, and turns around to leave the payphone box when the phone rings. The payphone rings behind him, loud and offensive. 

Ed picks it up, “Hello?”

On the other end of the phone, Ed can hear crunching, “Who’s this?”

“Riddles?” 

“Who is this?”

“Um,” Ed tries to clear his throat of the taste of all of his belongings burning, “We met— we met on the airplane. We had the same suitcase.” When there is no response but more crunching, Ed tries again. “The, uh, the clever guy?”

“Oh,” The Riddler laughs, “Oh, yeah. Right. Okay.”

“I called a second ago. There was no answer. I’m at a payphone,” Ed tries to explain.

“Yeah. I star-69’d you. I never pick up my phone.” On the other end of the phone, the crunching is unending and it makes Ed almost laugh, despite it all. “So, what’s up, man?”

“Uh, well— You’re not gonna believe this.”

They meet at a bar right across the street from a strip club. The place has no windows and the outside is covered in so much neon that it bathes the parking lot in an ethereal glow. 

“You know man,” The Riddler says, holding a mug of beer in his hand, “it could be worse. Some motherfucker could cut off your penis while you’re sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car.”

“There’s always that. I don’t know, it’s just— When you buy furniture you tell yourself, ‘That’s it. That’s the last sofa I’m gonna need. Whatever else happens, I’ve got that sofa problem handled.’ I had it all,” Ed rambles, sleeves rolled up and his own beer mug half finished as The Riddler looks at him, face unreadable. “I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.”

“Shit, man. Now it’s all gone.”

“All gone,” Ed echoes the sentiment with melodrama and works on his drink.

“All gone,” The Riddler echoes it with apathy, the way a person would tell their dog they have nothing more to give it, and refills his own mug from the pitcher on the table. “Do you know what a duvet is?”

“Comforter,” he tries, not entirely certain and especially not certain now that he’s had a few drinks. 

“It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word?” Ed stares at The Riddler with the most broken expression a man can wear, aside crying. “No. What are we then?”

“We’re, uh— I don’t know. Consumers.”

“Right. We are consumers,” The Riddler straightens up in his seat, riled up on his own self-righteousness. “We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty— These things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels,” he mimes a remote, clicking through cable networks mindlessly, “some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.”

“Martha Stewart,” tiredly, Ed seems to catch onto the spiel that The Riddler is giving.

“Fuck Martha Stewart,” he laughs, switching to a serious expression in a mere second. “Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down. So fuck off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns.” For a moment, Ed looks up at The Riddler with an expression of unguarded awe. He’s almost certain he never mentioned the patterns on his furniture, much less the brand name, but somehow The Riddler is just so aware that he got it all on the nose; Ed dreams of being this capable of reading people. “I say, never be complete. I say, stop being perfect. I say, let’s evolve. Let the chips fall where they may,” The Riddler picks up his drink, grunting around a mouthful of slowly-warming beer. “But that’s me, and I could be wrong. I’m not usually wrong, but I could be. Maybe it’s a terrible tragedy.”

“Nah, it’s just—“ Ed tries to sound committed but falls apart halfway through, “it’s just stuff. It’s not a tragedy, but—“

“Well, you did lose a lot of versatile solutions for modern living,” The Riddler reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a pack of cigarettes, putting one in his mouth and then offering it to Ed.

“Fuck. You’re right,” he deflates, shaking his head. “No, I don’t smoke.” With a little difficulty, The Riddler lights his cigarette and chucks his lighter onto the table, blowing smoke around Ed’s face. “My— My insurance is probably gonna cover it, so—“ when Ed looks up he realizes The Riddler is looking at him, considering him wordlessly with an expression that seems almost like pity, “What?”

“The things you own end up owning you.” In lieu of speaking, The Riddler keeps Ed quiet with a series of hand gestures, “But do what you like, man.” 

Outside the bar, Ed considers his watch as The Riddler takes the spare quarters out of the pay phone change return. “Oh, it’s late,” Ed complains, dropping his shoulders and staring at the sky, “Thanks for the beer.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“I should find a hotel,” when he turns to the payphone, The Riddler is blocking it. 

“A hotel?”

“Yeah.”

“Just ask, man.”

Confused, and suddenly somewhat nervous, Ed readjusts his hold on his briefcase and frowns, “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, God,” The Riddler laughs, “three pitchers of beer, and you still can’t ask.”

“What?” 

“You called me because you needed a place to stay,” he explains, as if it’s all so very simple.

“Oh, hey,” Ed recoils, holding his briefcase more tightly, “no, no, no. I didn’t mean—“

“Yes,” The Riddler huffs, more disgruntled than angry, “you did. So just ask. Cut the foreplay and just ask.”

For a moment, Ed stares at the expanse of empty sky and focuses on the buzz of neon above him. When he comes back, The Riddler is blowing smoke into his face again. “Would— Would that be a problem?”

“Is it a problem for you to ask?”

The frown on Ed’s face only deepens, “Can I stay at your place?”

“Yeah,” it sounds almost cheery as The Riddler walks out into the parking lot, expecting Ed to follow. 

“Thanks,” and although Ed is going to say more, he watches The Riddler flick his cigarette into the lot and come walking back with purpose. 

“I want you to do me a favor.”

“Yeah, sure,” ultimately, Ed feels like he has no other choice than to agree. 

“I want you to hit me as hard as you can,” he’s working a power stance, legs apart and one hand on his hip— The Riddler seems larger than Ed even though they seem to share the same height. 

Everything that comes out of the Riddler’s mouth seems to make no sense to Ed, goes in one ear and out the over because he simply couldn’t have said what Ed thinks he has, “What?”

“I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” Each word gets more properly enunciated and The Riddler is speaking to Ed as though he’s a child, nearly. 

_Let me tell you a little bit about The Riddler._

_Riddles was a night person. While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked. He had one part-time job as a projectionist. See, a movie doesn’t come all on one big reel. It comes on a few. So, someone has to be there to switch the projectors at the exact moment that one reel ends and the next one begins. If you look for it, you can see these little dots come into the upper right-hand corner of the screen. He told me that in the industry, they’re called cigarette burns. They’re the cue for a changeover. He flips the projectors, movie keeps right on going, and nobody in the audience has any idea._

_And why would he want that shit job?_

_Because it affords him other interesting opportunities. Like splicing single frames of pornography into family films. So, when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel three, that’s when you’ll catch a flash of Riddles’ contribution to the film._

_Nobody knows that they saw it, but they did. A nice, big cock, as Riddles called it. Even a hummingbird couldn’t catch him at work._

_The Riddler also works sometimes as a banquet waiter at the luxurious Pressman Hotel. He was the guerrilla terrorist in the food service industry. Apart from pissing in the lobster bisque, he farted on meringues, sneezed on braised endive, and as for the cream of mushroom soup, well— you get the idea._

“What do you want me to do?” Ed’s voice has gone frantic, head moving on a swivel, “You just want me to hit you?”

“Come on,” The Riddler tries to reason, “Do me this one favor.” 

“Why?”

“Why? I don’t know why! I don’t know,” he says, giving an overdramatic shrug, “I’ve never been in a fight. You?”

“No, but that’s a good thing,” for a moment, Ed’s mind goes back to the one time he nearly fought his coworker, a big brute of a man, but practically ran from the opportunity as soon as it came to him. He considers that a good decision, even now. 

“No, it is not,” mania sits on the edge of The Riddler’s voice, building up as he paces. “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars,” he says, pulling two beer bottles out of his pockets and setting them on the ground. “So, come on. Hit me, before I lose my nerve.”

“Oh, god,” Ed goes to set his briefcase down, avoiding a spilled bag of trash, “this is crazy, I—“

“So go crazy! Let ‘er rip.”

“Hey, I don’t know about this,” as he tries to speak, The Riddler is bouncing on the balls of his feet, a human coil of energy.

“I don’t either, but who gives a shit? No one’s watching,” he points out into the parking lot, at the empty cars and void on the other side of the pavement, “What do you care?”

“Wait,” Ed wants to find any reason to argue his way out of this, “This is crazy. You want me to hit you?”

“That’s right.”

“What, like, in the face?”

The Riddler laughs goofily before jabbing a quick finger in Ed’s direction, “Surprise me!” 

“This is so fucking stupid.” Despite his comment, Ed seems to consider his hand in an attempt to remember the proper way to form a fist. The Riddler is giving him the go-ahead in so many forms of body language, and so finally Ed goes in, half speed, and slams a poorly-formed fist into The Riddler’s head. 

“Motherfucker!” The Riddler jogs out and around, putting a hand over his ear, “You hit me in the ear!” 

“Well, Jesus,” was this not what he had wanted? “I’m sorry.”

“Ow! Christ!” When he comes back, the side of The Riddler’s head is pink, “Why the ear, man?”

“Ah, I fucked it up,” Ed’s self esteem wavers, but then he remembers that he did at least make contact with The Riddler at all, “kinda.”

“No,” there’s a darkness in The Riddler’s voice when he looks up, backlit in a different shade of green than he’s wearing, “that was perfect.” He lunges forward and punches Ed in the chest, knocking the wind right out of him. As Ed sits on the ground, holding a hand to his chest and wheezing, The Riddler crouches down to meet his level and hold out a hand, just for a moment. 

“Nah, it’s fine,” he says, waving off the hand. 

“You okay?” 

“That really hurts.”

“Right,” The Riddler bounces on his feet again, practically vibrating.

“Hit me again,” Ed finally manages, grinning just the slightest. The Riddler returns his smile with laughter, frantic and unhinged. 

“No, you hit me! Come on!” 

The two of them come together in poorly coordinated punches and a few well placed slaps. The Riddler is significantly better at giving punches but Ed is just as good at avoiding them. It’s noisy, the two of them screaming and grunting, The Riddler screeching out curses as if there isn’t another person in the world who could be bothered by his expressions of pain. 

Afterward, they sit on the curb just outside of the bar, Ed nursing one of the beers while The Riddler has another cigarette. In the distance, sirens wail and the streetlight above them flickers. Ed passes the bottle off to The Riddler, “We should do this again sometime,” he says, earning a laugh in response. 

The Riddler walks him down to Paper Street, walking in the puddles on the other side of the curb so that Ed can have the sidewalk to himself. As they come up on a house, derelict and reeking, Ed realizes that something is lacking. 

“Where’s your car?” he asks, remembering the beautiful red sports car he was sure he saw The Riddler leaving the airport in. 

“What car?” The Riddler throws the empty beer bottle as far down the road as it can go, watching it shatter in a puddle. 

The house smells like mildew and rot. Somehow, the lights still work but what little sight they do provide into the state of the house almost feels unwelcome. 

Some things are better left unseen. 

_I don’t know how The Riddler found that house, but he said he’d been there for a year. It looked like it was waiting to be torn down. Most of the windows were boarded up. There’s no lock on the door from when the police, or whoever, kicked it in. The stairs were ready to collapse. I didn’t know if he owned it or if he was squatting._

_Neither would have surprised me._  

At the top of the stairs, The Riddler tosses his jacket into one room and leads Ed to another door. Inside is a single, stained mattress with a blanket on top. On the walls, there’s a pattern going over the faded paint; Ed isn’t sure if it’s wallpaper or if the patterns are actually mold colonies. 

“Yep,” The Riddler says, pushing the door open wider. “That’s you.” He turns in the doorway, pointing to his room, “That’s me,” he points another door over, “That’s the toilet. Good?”

“Yeah, thanks,” he lies, hesitantly setting his briefcase down on the floor and dropping himself onto the mattress. 

_What a shit-hole. Nothing worked._

Ed goes in the next morning for a shower, fussing with knobs and faucets until the creaking in the pipes gives way to water. The calcium deposits on the shower head keep the water from running freely, and what water that does come out is rusty, the color of old blood or rotting teeth. 

_Turning on one light meant another light in the house went out. There were no neighbors, just some warehouses and a paper mill— That fart smell of steam, the hamster cage smell of wood chips._

In comparison to Ed’s flannel bathrobe, The Riddler has one in a terrible, faded, stained shade of green. Worst of all, it’s fuzzy, and he takes to wearing it whenever he isn’t dressed up. 

They return to the bar most nights, without much else to do, and continue their routine of fighting to, as they’ve decided to call it, let off steam. 

One night, two men come upon the fight, a bit amused as they watch Ed get the shit beat out of him, only to say “It’s fine, it’s cool,” and smile through the pain. 

At work, Ed sports a black eye and a split lip, something that Jim can’t really write him up for, but he still looks at it with disdain. Sometimes, when he comes in to give Ed the daily rundown on his reports, Ed is almost certain he sees concern in Jim’s eyes, just far enough off that he doesn’t say anything. 

Back at the house, the broken windows and failing walls do nothing to keep out the sound of thunder. 

 _Every time it rained, we had to kill the power._  

In the basement, as water slowly fills, Ed watches from the stairs as The Riddler fusses with a fusebox. He twists something until it gives, going out in sparks and taking the electricity in the house with it. 

_By the end of the first month, I didn’t miss TV. I didn’t even mind the warm, stale refrigerator._

In the parking lot of the bar, the circle of men watching Ed and The Riddler fight grows steadily. Eventually, other men step into the ring, taking on Ed or The Riddler to see just what all the fuss is really about. 

A man is a suit comes up on the circle and lingers at the edge until one of the men currently fighting falls to the ground. He stands up closer, finally sheepishly putting his hand up, “Can I be next?”

Ed looks to The Riddler for guidance, considers him in his rolled up sleeves and messy hair. 

“Alright, man,” The Riddler says, breathing heavily, “but lose the tie.” 

On Paper Street, in the yard of the terrible abandoned house they’ve come to call home, Ed and The Riddler use stolen golf clubs to send pieces of garbage sailing. 

Ed drives something into what might be a car, breaking glass and shattering. Skittishly, he goes rigid and waits for the sound of a car alarm; he’s only met with the sound of The Riddler’s laughter. 

_At night, The Riddler and I were alone for a half a mile in every direction._

_Rain trickled down through the plaster and the light fixtures. Everything wooden swelled and shrank.  Everywhere were rusted nails to snag your elbow on._

_The previous occupant had been a bit of a shut-in._

As the rain comes in through the ceiling, Ed sits perched on a throne of old magazines, hiding where the water has yet to seep through. He uses a flashlight to provide more light than the various candles they have throughout the house are giving him, as he leafs through a stack of papers in his lap.

The Riddler comes through the living room and goes into the kitchen, riding on a children’s bike. He’s wearing his awful, dirty robe again, far too loosely tied at the waist. “Hey, man,” he dings the bell at Ed, laughing, “what are you reading?”

“Listen to this. It’s an article written by an organ in the first person,” Ed stares at he paper before finally reading from it, “ _I am Jack’s medulla oblongata. Without me, Jack could not regulate his heart rate, blood pressure, or breathing_.” As The Riddler makes a second round on his bike, Ed closes the cover of the article. “There’s a whole series of these,” he comes across a particularly entertaining one, “ _I am Jill’s nipples. I am Jack’s colon._ ” 

“Yeah,” The Riddler knocks something over in the kitchen and doesn’t stop to see what it was, “ ‘I get cancer. I kill Jack’.” In the midst of his laughter, The Riddler misses his turn to avoid the small breakfast nook, and ends up hitting the table and falling off of his bike.

Ed nearly slips off of his decomposing magazine throne, laughing, unguarded and obnoxious. 

At work, Jim eyes Ed as he blots blood from his lip. 

_After fighting, everything in your life got the volume turned down._

Jim’s voice sounds like it’s underwater as he stands in the doorway to Ed’s cubicle, hands on his hips. 

“What?” 

_You could deal with anything._

At first, when Jim continues to come toward Ed’s desk, his voice is still faded and unclear. He reaches the midpoint and Ed can finally make it out; “Have you finished those reports?” 

Easily, Ed reaches into his desk drawer and hands out the proper reports, giving Jim that uneasy, all teeth smile. 

After a fight, Ed and The Riddler share the bathroom to properly fix themselves up. Tonight, The Riddler soaks in the bathtub as Ed blots his bleeding nose with peroxide. 

“If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?” The Riddler asks, scrubbing at his arms.

“I’d fight my boss, probably,” Ed’s voice is nasally as he works at his nose, somehow more bookish than he already sounds. 

“Really?”

“Yeah. Why?” he looks over at The Riddler’s bare shoulder, watches the muscle as it works, “Who would you fight?” 

“I’d fight my dad.”

“I don’t know my dad,” Ed concedes, setting the peroxide down. “I mean, I know him, but he left when I was like, six years old. He married this other woman and had some other kids. He did this, like, every six years,” he starts to laugh, but it dies when he thinks too hard about it, “he goes to a new city, and starts a new family.”

“Fucker’s setting up franchises,” from one of the candles set around the room, The Riddler lights himself a cigarette and sinks lower into the tub. He drapes a wet towel over his eyes, chattering around the cigarette. “My dad never went to college, so it was real important that I go.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“So, I graduate. I call him up long distance,” The Riddler mimes it all as Ed puts butterfly bandages across his face, “I say ‘Dad, now what?’ He says, ‘Get a job.’”

Ed laughs, putting a bandage across his knuckles, “Same here.”

“Now, I’m 25. I make my yearly call again. I say, ‘Dad, now what?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. Get married.’” Disgusted, The Riddler takes a long sip of his beer that’s sitting tub-side.

“I mean,” Ed scoffs, “I can’t get married. I’m a 30-year-old boy.” 

“We’re a generation of men raised by women,” The Riddler says, self righteous in his bath time awareness, “I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” 

The next morning, Ed fixes The Riddler’s bowtie as he comes downstairs in his waiter’s suit. He pushes a mug of coffee toward The Riddler, patient as he can be at five in the morning. 

_Most of the week, we were Ozzie and Harriet. But every Saturday night, we were finding something out._

Now, as the circle of men fights amongst themselves, Ed and The Riddler watch, sitting on the hood of someone’s beat up Roadmaster. 

_We were finding out more and more that we were not alone. It used to be that when I came home angry or depressed—_

Walking back from one of the various bus stops Ed takes to and from work, he passes the church he used to attend group sessions at. “Good night, Oswald,” he hears someone call, looking over just in time to see Oswald, in all of his tacky glory, walking down the road. 

_—I’d just polish my Scandinavian furniture. I should’ve been looking for a new condo. I should’ve been haggling with my insurance company. I should’ve been upset about my nice, neat, flaming little shit._

_But I wasn’t._

“The basic premise of cyber-netting any office is to make things more efficient,” in an office with Ed, Jim, and two of his coworkers, sits a man who has far more confidence than he’s earned. 

_Monday mornings, all I could do was think about next week._

“Can I get the icon in cornflower blue?” Jim asks, charming as always but narrowly missing the whole purpose of this meeting. 

“Absolutely,” the man shifts his glasses up his nose by tapping the side of the frames, so comfortably casual that Ed wants to punch him square in the nose. “Efficiency is priority number one, people. Because waste is a thief. I showed this already to my man here,” he points at Ed, as if their five minute discussion before the meeting had held some kind of weight, “you liked it, didn’t you?”

Instead of speaking, Ed mouths words through bloody, gritted teeth. Everyone at the table is horrified, but honestly, Ed thinks he did a pretty good job of being civil, all things considered. 

_You can swallow a pint of blood before you get sick._

Ed swallows the blood and continues on, scribbles down more notes as the meeting continues. 

_It was right in everyone’s face. The Riddler and I just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The Riddler and I just gave it a name._

They don’t go to the bar to drink anymore, instead they show up at closing and follow the oldest bartender to the basement. Lights inside the bar turn off as they walk by, followed by a group of various men with various forms of bruising on their faces that match that on Ed’s. The Riddler’s face seems to take better to punches, the bruising blends into his skin tone better, and he hides it all behind tacky sunglasses. 

The basement smells like spilled beer and dust, a disgusting combination of scents that nobody could possibly come to like, not ever. The Riddler stands at the front of the group of men, looks to Ed off to the side before speaking. 

_Every week, The Riddler gave the rules that he and I decided._

“Gentlemen” he says, speaking as though he were about to do a Shakespearean monologue, “welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is,” as he speaks, The Riddler looks over the group of men, making sure that everyone is listening to him, ensuring there is no dissent, “you do not talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club— someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out; the fight is over. Fourth rule— only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule— one fight at a time, boys.” Throughout the room, uneasy laughter filters from a few brave souls, “Sixth rule— no shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule— fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule—“ if Ed were a filmmaker, this is where he’d do a classic close up on The Riddler’s face, where he’d make sure every scar on his face is visible, where he’d make sure the backlighting is just right to show the sinister edge to his personality, “if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.” 

Men are interesting creatures, rutting up against one another in a dirty room, slick with blood and sweat. Ed has always appreciated his ability to understand things, to be able to think through problems and find answers. Even still, he can’t seem to understand what makes this behavior acceptable, versus what doesn’t. 

_This kid from work, Jonathan, couldn’t remember whether you ordered pens with blue ink or black. But Jonathan was a god for ten minutes when he trounced the maitre d’ of a local food court._

Jonathan is roughly 100 pounds of skin and bones, overcome by his frantic terror and his violent disposition as he throws his bony fist into another man’s face. Under the pressure, bones snap and twist, the man’s face crumbling as he falls to the floor. 

 _Sometimes, all you could hear were the flat, hard packing sounds over the yelling._  

Jonathan crawls over the other man’s body, straddles his hips and grabs his hair before punching him square in the nose. He goes over, and over, and over again, dripping blood into the other man’s eyes. The man reaches up, puts his hand on Jonathan’s chin and pushes him away weakly. 

_Or the wet choke when someone caught their breath and sprayed—_

“Stop!” The man can barely lift himself up off of the floor, can barely speak around the hot, wet blood in his mouth. 

_You weren’t alive anywhere like you were there. But Fight Club only exists in the hours between when Fight Club starts and when Fight Club ends._

At work, Ed gives Jonathan a reserved nod from behind the copying machine as Jonathan walks by with his supply cart. His face is swollen, a busted lip and butterfly bandages over his eyebrow— Ed doesn’t look much better. 

_Even if I could tell someone they had a good fight, I wouldn’t be talking to the same man. Who you were in Fight Club is not who you were in the rest of the world._

At a restaurant, Ed sits alone at a table and nurses a bowl of soup. His brain pulses behind his eyes, a sore jaw keeping him from chewing quite as much as he’d like to. Even with his sunglasses and his nice suit, he looks like hell. 

_The guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood._

Ed and The Riddler walk side by side, up to a bus stop, sharing a cigarette that Ed smokes uncomfortably. He holds the thing all wrong, between his thumb and middle finger because he wants to avoid getting the smell on his skin. 

“If you could fight any celebrity,” Ed leads in, “who would you fight?”

“Alive or dead?”

“It doesn’t matter. Who’d be tough?” 

“Hemingway,” The Riddler grins around the cigarette in his mouth, throwing it to the ground when the bus comes up, “you?”

“Shatner,” Ed walks onto the bus first, seeming proud of his decision, “I’d fight William Shatner.” 

The Riddler doesn’t ask why.

 _We all started seeing things differently. Everywhere we went, we were sizing things up._  

Ed pays his bus fare and takes hold of the standing rail, with The Riddler beside him. Together, they share the same sour expression as they look over the other people on the bus, people coughing and wheezing, somehow entirely below the two of them. 

_I felt sorry for guys packed into gyms, trying to look like how Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger said they should._

“Is that what a man looks like?” Ed asks, pointing The Riddler in the direction of a Gucci ad that shows more skin than Ed has ever thought of showing himself. 

The Riddler lets out a disgusting, gasping laugh as he stares at the bare ass, the chiseled abs, the meaty thighs, “Self-improvement is masturbation,” he says, chewing on the spare skin of his cheek. “Now, self-destruction—“

Before he can finish his thought, a man passes between them and leaves the two of them disgusted. He smells like ham and unwashed gym socks— If Ed had eaten that day, he would have vomited. 

Later, in the basement, The Riddler mercilessly beats the shit out of a doorman. The men around them scream, they chant, they watch as blood blossoms from The Riddler’s lip but he just will not stop. Finally, the man beneath him pats at his chest, pushes him off. 

Ed fights more frantically, grabbing people and swinging them when they think they can slam him down onto the floor. He plants himself on top of another man’s hips, bears down until he has control. Somehow, the other man gets him on his stomach, folds his arm behind his back and watches as Ed’s left hand scrabbles at the cardboard mat on the floor. 

_Fight Club wasn’t about winning or losing. It wasn’t about words. The hysterical shouting was in tongues, like in a Pentecostal church._

The man slams Ed’s face into the floor, holds him by his hair and hits his brow bone against cement. Ed doesn’t want to, but he hears himself ask the other man to stop. 

_When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. Afterwards, we all felt saved._

Ed drips blood onto the floor from his broken eyebrow, a sick wet sound, like ink spilling from a well. 

“Hey, man,” the fighter says, offering Ed his hand, “how about next week?” 

Through the blood in his eye, Ed looks up at him blearily. He takes the hand and stumbles upright, “How about next month?”

“I hear you.”

The Riddler points with a bloody hand, “Harvey, you’re in the middle. New guy, you too.” He follows Ed to the hospital. 

 _Sometimes, The Riddler spoke for me_.

Ed keeps as still as he can as a doctor stitches his eyebrow closed. 

“ _Fell down some stairs._ ”

“I fell down some stairs,” Ed tells the doctor, swallowing the blood in the back if his throat. 

 _Fight Club became the reason to cut your hair short or trim your fingernails._  

In their house, Ed and The Riddler share a bathroom as they preen. Ed viciously scrubs his teeth as The Riddler tends to his fingernails. The water coming out of the tap is brown, stinking of metal, but it’s better than nothing.

“Okay,” The Riddler says, “any historical figure.”

“I’d fight Gandhi.”

“Shit,” for a moment, The Riddler is speechless. “Good answer.”

“How about you?” Blood and toothpaste foam drip down Ed’s lip and over his chin. 

“Lincoln.”

“Lincoln?” Ed’s voice sounds much younger when he speaks around his toothbrush. 

“Mm,” The Riddler stands up, walking past Ed as he reaches into his mouth. “Big guy, big reach. Skinny guys fight til they’re burger.”

“Fuck,” Ed pulls a tooth out of his mouth, covered in blood and what feels like sand against his tongue. 

The Riddler only laughs, scratching his bare chest, “Even the Mona Lisa’s falling apart.”

Ed drops the tooth into the sink, watches it spin around and around before it falls down the drain, loudly. 

The next day, Ed comes downstairs, half dressed for work when the phone rings. In the dining room, The Riddler is attempting to master the use of nunchucks. 

“Hello?” 

“Where have you been the last eight weeks?” The voice on the other end of the line is Oswald’s, but without the usual harshness. 

“Oswald?” In the background, The Riddler does a particularly convincing karate yell, leading Ed to hide around the corner. “How’d you find me?”

“You left that forwarding number,” he says, as if it’s far too obvious. Oswald leans himself back in his bed, silk shirt buttoned sloppily, phone cord wrapped around his neck. “I haven’t seen you in any support groups.” 

“Yeah, we split them up. That was the idea, remember?”

“Yeah,” Oswald’s voice is almost too quiet against the loud jazz he has playing in the background, “but you haven’t been going to yours.”

“How do you know?” Even though Oswald can’t see him, Ed wiggles his head combatively. 

“I cheated.” 

Another karate yell. “I found a new one.” 

Oswald sits up in bed, toying with the phone cord, “Really?”

“You wouldn’t like it,” Ed tells Oswald, gritting his teeth as The Riddler makes yet another karate yell, slamming the nunchuck into an aging chair. “Look, this is a bad time.”

“I’ve been going to Debtors Anonymous,” Oswald steamrolls, dropping back onto the bed and glaring at his empty bottles of pills. “You wanna see some really fucked-up people?” 

“I’m just on my way out.”

“Me, too,” he says, somewhat cheerful, “I’ve got a stomach full of Xanax. I took what was left of a bottle,” when he speaks, a tiny little accent slips through his lips, “it might have been too much.”

_Just picture watching Oswald Cobblepot throw himself around his crummy apartment._

“But,” Oswald says, sniffling somewhat, “this isn’t a for-real suicide thing. This is probably one of those cry-for-help things.”

_This could go on for hours._

“You’re staying in tonight, then?” Ed rolls his eyes, even though there’s nobody there to see him do it, or appreciate just how expertly he does. 

“Do you wanna wait,” he offers, small, ring-bearing hand clattering agains the clamshell of his apartment-issue phone, “and hear me describe death?” Slowly, Ed puts the phone on top of the receiver, leaving it off the hook as he walks away, “Do you wanna listen and see if my spirit can use a phone? Have you ever heard a death rattle before?” 

Ed doesn’t stick around to hear the rest. He isn’t particularly interested. 

The next morning, after waking up too early in the morning, covered in sweat and stress, Ed stops in the middle of the upstairs. 

_The Riddler’s door was closed. I’d been living here for two months, and The Riddler’s door was never closed._

In the toilet, there are too many condoms, none of them properly tied off, just floating in the dirty water like empty threats. That aside, it isn’t uncommon for The Riddler to bring people to the house, so Ed walks away, unbothered.

Ed eats his cereal from a dirty tupperware and reads a magazine a third time over, trying his hardest not to scratch at the gauze over his eyebrow. When he hears footsteps, Ed perks up and tilts his head to the side, “You won’t believe this dream I had last night.”

“Yeah?” The voice isn’t The Riddlers, but instead is harsh and filtered through years of smoking, “I can hardly believe anything about last night.” Oswald walks through the kitchen like it’s his own house, rinsing his mouth with tap water and giving Ed a wink before he spits. 

“What— What are you doing here?”

“What?” Oswald blinks slowly, hair much less put together than usual.

“This is my house,” Ed says quickly, thrown into an upheaval. “What are you doing in my house?”

Oswald looks from Ed’s face, from his busted eyebrow to his lips, over his shoulders and lingers on his hands. “Fuck you,” he says, walking out once but having to come back in to collect his coat. 

As soon as Oswald is out, The Riddler comes strutting through the kitchen, all messy hair and dirty green bathrobe. “Oh, you’ve got some fucked up friends,” he says, laughing frantically as he comes up to the sink, “I’m telling you. Limber, though.” In the silence where Ed doesn’t ask any questions, simply stares and looks mortified as can be, The Riddler turns around and continues, proudly. “So I come in last night. Phone’s off the hook. Guess who’s on the other end.”

_I already knew the story before he told it to me._

Rolling back through time and space, The Riddler walks up on the phone that sits off of the hook, Oswald’s voice tinny like a radio. “Have you ever heard a death rattle before?” he asks, unaware as The Riddler walks up on the phone and listens in, “Do you think it’ll live up to its name? Or will it just be a death hair ball?” Oswald’s voice stops for a moment, coming back after a particularly pathetic coughing fit. “Prepare to evacuate soul—“ and he starts counting down from ten. 

_Now, how could The Riddler, of all people, think it was a bad thing that Oswald Cobblepot was about to die?_

At what may be the halfway mark through his counting, Oswald stops to handle a knock at his door. He stumbles pitifully, opening the door and pulling The Riddler in by the edge of his jacket. 

“You got here fast,” Oswald says, looking The Riddler up and down, listening as he chews his gum loudly. “Did I call _you?_ ” After considering his luck, Oswald shrugs and goes to sit on the edge of his bed, sliding right off and hitting the floor with a breathless laugh. The Riddler can’t help but snort, leaning on the chest of drawers. “The mattress is all sealed in slippery plastic,” Oswald explains, smiling up at the other man.

The Riddler simply smiles, doesn’t speak. He jostles the chest of drawers casually, looking over at a particularly large dildo as it wiggles. 

“Oh, don’t worry,” Oswald says, even snarky in the face of death, “it’s not a threat to you.” In the background, sirens stall in the parking lot, loud and unpleasant. “Oh, fuck,” Oswald can barely keep his words together. “Somebody called the cops.”

Wordless but ever confident, The Riddler hauls Oswald out of his apartment. Oswald struggles to lock his apartment door around the sleeves of his over-sized jacket, and The Riddler eventually just drags him away from it. As they go down the hallway, paramedics come at them and The Riddler pulls he and Oswald into a hallway alcove, snapping his fingers with the rhythm of footsteps. 

“513—“ A paramedic stops beside them, waving his hand frantically, “Where’s 513?”

“Oh, end of the hall,” Oswald says, pointing at his own apartment door, “you know, the man who lives there used to be a charming, lovely young man!” As The Riddler guides Oswald down the hall, he bangs on every door he passes, creating an audience for the spectacle. “He’s lost faith in himself!”

“Mister Cobblepot!” The paramedic slams on Oswald’s door, open palm as he wiggles the doorknob. 

“He’s a monster!” With The Riddler pulling him down the stairs, Oswald has to turn around and hold onto the railing to scream up at his apartment. 

“You have every reason to live!” 

“He’s infectious human waste!” Oswald turns around again, wrenching out of The Riddler’s grip to be allowed the opportunity to scream some more. “Good luck trying to save him!” And The Riddler laughs, swinging Oswald around by his jacket sleeve. 

In the house, The Riddler mixes something nondescript in a pot while Oswald watches him from the floor, “If I fall asleep,” he says, head lolling to the side, “I’m done for.” The Riddler looks at him, still wearing his tinted sunglasses inside the poorly lit house. “You’re gonna have to keep me up all night.” 

And suddenly, time rolls back to Ed and The Riddler, the morning after, as Ed tries to stomach what’s left of his cereal. 

“Un-fucking-believeable,” The Riddler says, spitting into the sink. 

 _He was obviously able to handle it._  

“You know what I mean,” he says to Ed, looking over his shoulder for a split second, “you fucked him.”

“No, I didn’t.” 

“Never?”

“No.”

“You’re not into him, are you?” Having traded his glass of water for a cigarette, The Riddler looks like a trailer trash nightmare. 

“No! God, not at all.”

_I am Jack’s raging bile duct._

“Are you sure?” As though he’s been taking classes, The Riddler’s voice sounds almost sympathetic, almost caring, “You can tell me.”

“Believe me, I’m sure.”

 _Put a gun to my head and paint the walls with my brains._  

“Well, that’s good, ‘cause he’s a predator posing as a house pet. Stay away from that one,” he laughs, gesturing with his cigarette. “And the shit that came out of this man’s mouth, I’ve never heard anything like it!” 

In bed, last night, The Riddler worked through a cigarette as Oswald laid down next to him, properly wrapped up in a blanket mostly devoid of stains. “My god,” Oswald said, making himself comfortable, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” And try as he might, The Riddler couldn’t keep himself from laughing. 

The Riddler shudders in the kitchen, laughing it off when it all feels too much. 

_How could The Riddler not go for that? The night before last, he was splicing sex organs into Cinderella._

“Oswald doesn’t need a lover,” Ed says, discomfort being turned into anger, “he needs a fucking caseworker.” 

“He needs a wash,” The Riddler counters, “and this isn’t love, it’s sport fucking.” 

_He invaded my support groups. Now he’d invaded my home._

When Ed moves to walk away from the conversation, The Riddler shakes his head and gestures for Ed to sit back down. “Now, listen,” he starts, sitting down next to Ed, “I can’t have you talking to him about me.”

“Why would I talk to him—“

“You say anything about me, or what goes on in this house to him, or to anybody, we’re done.” The seriousness of the statement surprises Ed, leads him to look at The Riddler with a surprisingly unguarded expression. “Now promise me.”

“Okay.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.”

“Promise.”

“I just said I promise!” Ed whines, voice breaking because he just doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand why this is so important, he doesn’t understand how he’s gotten into this position, and he surely doesn’t understand why Oswald fucking Cobblepot is important enough to prompt such a discussion between them. 

“That’s three times you promised,” The Riddler takes his glass of water and his cigarette up the stairs. 

_If only I had wasted a couple of minutes and gone to watch Oswald Cobblepot die, none of this would have happened._

Oswald is as noisy as he is grouchy, apparently. As Ed does sit-ups in the living room, he can hear Oswald’s voice all the way up in The Riddler’s bedroom, wanton and bordering on screeching. 

It seems like the only sound happening ever, Oswald’s voice keening higher and higher, beginning and pleading. Even when it rains, when the lights stutter and flicker and hiss with the threat of fire, Oswald doesn’t stop. The sound of bedsprings won’t stop, and Ed can even hear it in the basement as he kills the breaker box. 

_I could’ve moved to another room on the third floor, where I might not have heard them. But I didn’t._

As Ed comes back up the stairs, going to his bedroom, he stops by The Riddler’s room because the door is open only slightly. Where he thinks he can just stare and then disappear back to bed, Ed is caught by The Riddler, fully undressed. How pleasant. 

“What are you doing?”

“Just going back to bed,” Ed tries, putting a hand up so that he doesn’t have to look directly at all of The Riddler. 

In the background, Oswald slides off the side of the bed again, lucky only falling a few inches from the mattress to the floor. “Wanna finish him off?” The Riddler asks, barely smothering a laugh. 

“No. No, thank you.” 

“I found the cigarettes,” Oswald says, holding them up and emerging from the floor with a confused expression. “Who are you talking to?” 

“Shut up,” The Riddler tells him, closing the door. 

As Oswald’s voice fills the crevices of the house once more, Ed brushes his teeth with an almost military precision. He glares at himself in the mirror, grits his teeth so hard it hurts. 

 _I became the calm little center of the world. I was the Zen master._  

At work, Ed taps away at his computer with no life in his eyes. “Worker bees can leave / Even drones can fly away / The queen is their slave.” 

_I wrote little haiku poems. I e-mailed them to everyone._

“Is that your blood?” Jim shows up in Ed’s peripheral vision, surprising him. When Ed looks down to check his shirt for blood, he drops cigarette ash on himself. Oh well. 

“Some of it, yeah.” 

“You— You can’t smoke in here,” Jim says, sounding more like a worried mother than a disappointed boss. Ed only coughs at him, full apathy. “Take the rest of the day off. Come back Monday with some clean clothes. Get yourself together.” 

Ed walks down the stairwell leading to the floor level of his office building, jacket in one hand and messy briefcase in the other. With every person that passes, his vicious expression worsening. He leaves the building and walks home without a word, because he doesn’t need to. 

_I got right in everyone’s hostile little face. Yes, these are bruises from fighting. Yes, I’m comfortable with that. I am enlightened._

_You give up the condo life, give up all your flaming, worldly possessions, go live in_ _a dilapidated house in a toxic-waste part of town and you have to come home to this._

Upstairs, so hard that the ceiling plaster comes off, The Riddler and Oswald add noise to the house once again. It never seems to end. 

In his boxers and his undershirt, Ed scrubs at bloodstains on his clothes with a toothbrush in the kitchen sink. The phone rings, and despite the annoyance with the noise in the house, Ed goes over and answers it with minimal violence, “Hello?”

“Yes. this is Detective Alvarez with the arson unit. We have some new information about the incident at your former condo.”

Suddenly, the noise around Ed seems to go quiet, or maybe that’s just his own surprise. “Yes?”

“I don’t know if you’re aware, but it seems that someone sprayed Freon into your front door lock, then tapped it with a chisel to shatter the cylinder.”

“No, I wasn’t aware of that at all,” Ed says, staring at the sight outside the window over the sink. 

 _I am Jack’s cold sweat._  

“Does this sound strange to you?” 

“Uh, yes, sir. Strange. Very strange.” Not that strange.

“The dynamite—“

“Dynamite?”

“—left a residue of ammonium oxalate potassium chloride. Do you know what this means?”

“No. What does it mean?” Ed knows what it means, he isn’t stupid. 

“It means it was homemade.”

“I’m sorry,” Ed doesn’t sound very sorry, his voice coming out extremely deadpan, “This is just coming as quite a shock to me, sir.”

“See, whoever set this homemade dynamite could’ve blown out your pilot light days before the actual explosion. The gas was just the detonator.” 

“Who would go and do such a thing?” 

“I’ll ask the questions.” 

“Tell him,” The Riddler says, sliding up alongside Ed and nearly scaring the phone right out of his hand. “Tell him the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception.” Ed hushes The Riddler, much like a mother would a child.

“Excuse me, are you there?” 

“No, I am listening,” Ed tells the detective, adding a bit of an edge to his voice. “It’s a little hard to know what to make of all this.”

“Have you recently made enemies with anyone who might have access to homemade dynamite?”

“Enemies?” 

“Reject the basic assumptions of civilization,” The Riddler hollers, perched on the kitchen table, “especially the importance of material possessions!”

“Son, this is serious.”

“Yes, I know it’s serious,” Ed tells him, huffing.

“I mean that.”

“Yes, it’s very serious. Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me,” Ed’s voice hitches up, high and whiny. “That condo was my life, okay? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was me!”

_I’d like to thank the Academy._

“Is this not a good time for you?” 

“Just tell him you fucking did it!” The Riddler’s voice sounds like a screech as he passes by, shoulder checking Ed. “Tell him you blew it all up. That’s what he wants to hear.” And he disappears up the stairs, ugly robe trailing behind him. 

“Are you still there?”

“Wait,” Ed still sounds mortified, “are you saying that I’m a suspect?”

“No, no. I may need to talk to you a little further, so how about you just let me know if you’re gonna leave town. Okay?”

“Okay.” Ed hangs the phone up, jaw slack and body emotionally spent. He returns to his clothes in the sink, scrubbing again with a newfound aggression.

 _Except for their humping, The Riddler and Oswald were never in the same room. My parents pulled this exact same act for years._  

On cue, Oswald comes limping down the stairs, dressed in one of the ugliest suits Ed has ever seen in his life. The whole thing screams “outrageous” but in 1975, when there were no rules for fashion, and when tacky was considered to be the sign for good taste. It’s gaudy, covered in weird fabrics and strange patterns, fitted with too many pockets and a fake flower eternally pinned on the lapel. 

“The condom is the glass slipper of our generation,” Oswald starts off, sounding surprisingly lucid without a cigarette between his lips. He’s wearing platforms. “You slip one on when you meet a stranger, you dance all night, then you throw it away.” There goes the lucidity— he puts a cigarette to his mouth and fusses with the lighter, “The condom, I mean. Not the stranger.” 

Ed doesn’t laugh. “What?”

“I got this suit at a thrift store for one dollar,” Oswald says, fixing the jacket as though realigning it on his thin shoulders is what it takes to make it look less horrible. 

“It was worth every penny,” Ed doesn’t bother to look at the suit again, doesn’t want to be able to remember it if suddenly he were needed to tell police what Oswald was last seen wearing. 

“It’s a groomsman’s suit. Someone loved it intensely for one day,” he runs his fingers over the paisley designs, over the switches from purple, to red, to green, “then tossed it.” Vaguely, Ed realizes that Oswald is advancing on him, moving ever closer like the predator The Riddler described him to be. Ed keeps scrubbing. “Like a Christmas tree. So special. Then, bam,” Oswald is flush against Ed’s back, having to crane his neck upward to see the outline of his jaw, hand over Ed’s dick in his boxers, “it’s on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it, like a sex crime victim, underwear inside out, bound with electrical tape.” 

Ed’s whole face screws up with disgust, with confusion, with the genuine effort it takes for him not to get a boner. “Well, then it suits you.” 

“Maybe you’re right,” and Oswald stomps off, up the stairs and into the great egress. Does the rest of the house even exist when nobody is looking at it? Ed worries about this often. 

On the other side of the kitchen, passing in and out like a phantom, The Riddler is wearing only his ugliest pair of cargo pants, “Get rid of him.” 

“Why can’t you get rid of him?” Ed calls after him, louder than he needs to be. 

“Don’t mention me.” 

_I’m six years old again, passing messages between parents._

Oswald comes stomping through in his platform shoes, giving Ed a glare that he doesn’t see because he’s squeezing his eyes shut so hard that it feels like he isn’t about to cry. 

“You know,” Ed says, trying his hardest to sound firm, “I really think it’s time you got out of here.” 

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving.”

“Not that we don’t love your little visits,” he snarks, stepping back from the sink. 

“You know, you are such a nutcase. I can’t even begin to keep up.” Oswald has worn through his first cigarette, and at some point in his time upstairs, he’s lit a second one. As he leaves, slamming doors and knocking bottles around, Ed thinks Oswald might be singing to himself. 

“Thanks, bye!” 

The Riddler comes back downstairs, wearing a shirt printed like those tacky tourist Hawaiian shirts, except it’s autumnal leaves instead of plumeria flowers. Where the fuck did he get that? “Ah,” he laughs, ashing his cigarette wherever, “you kids.” 

“Wh—“ Ed tries to bring his voice down, not wanting to sound like a child, “Why do you still waste time with him?” 

“I’ll say this about Oswald,” The Riddler shakes a tin of coffee, finding just enough inside, “at least he’s trying to hit bottom.”

“What, and I’m not?” 

“Sticking feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken,” The Riddler says, in lieu of a real answer. 

“What are we doing tonight?” Maybe a change of direction will improve the overall bad taste this entire experience is leaving in Ed’s mouth. 

“Tonight?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Tonight,” The Riddler is giving himself a shitty sponge bath with the rag from the sink, scrubbing at his chest and underarms before throwing the towel back at the ground, “we make soap.”

“Soap?”

“To make soap, first we render fat.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really get a kick out of superimposing tyler's self-righteous preachings onto the riddler. it just kinda.... fits. 
> 
> apparently the "i haven't been fucked like that since grade school" line used to be something like "i want to have your abortion" but was changed for the movie. fun little tid bit the internet told me, because i've been googling fight club related stuff for Months leading up to the completion of this fic. 
> 
> also, something that struck me while editing; riddler makes ed promise three times that he won't talk to oswald about him, and that Three Times thing was like. haunting me for a while. wasn't sure why. until i remembered that sometimes when people try to convert to judaism, they're turned away three times before getting acceptance— i know that's not why it's like that in fight club, but since i regard my ed as jewish, it was a fun little. somethin'. 
> 
> anyway, thanks for reading. 
> 
> talk to me on tumblr! i'm [ mayor-crumblepot ](https://mayor-crumblepot.tumblr.com)


	3. Chapter 3

The Riddler isn’t particularly physically fit, but he has a solid sprint on him when he needs one. With Ed close behind him, The Riddler throws a mat over the barbed wire of a fence, launching himself over it. Ed pulls the mat in after them once he’s over, hiding behind a dumpster as not to be seen by the security guard. “The salt balance has to be just right,” The Riddler whispers, gasping for air, “so the best fat for making soap comes from humans.” 

“Wait,” Ed pushes his glasses up his nose nervously, hands clenching at his sides, “what is this place?”

“A liposuction clinic.” Once the security guard is gone, The Riddler dives for another dumpster, hopping in as though he’s got nothing to fear by doing so. “Aha! Found it!” The Riddler holds up a bag of fat, labelled with the trademark biohazard symbol, “The richest, creamiest fat in the world.” As he throws the bag at Ed, swallowing laughter as he struggles with the bag and the texture within, The Riddler raises his voice just a touch, “Fat of the land!” 

Ed stands on a stack of biohazard drums and throws bags of fat over the fence to The Riddler. He narrowly misses the barbed wire each time, until he ultimately snags a bag on it. The plastic rips, just a bit at first, until the fat is gushing out, right over The Riddler’s hands. “Oh, God,” Ed gasps, covering his face with his sleeve, throwing the last bag clean over before launching himself out over the mat they brought with them. 

Back in the safety of their house, with The Riddler bathed and no longer stinking of something distinctly human, The Riddler works at the stovetop. The entire kitchen looks more like a science lab in a morbidly underfunded school, covered in various pots, straining apparatuses, all of which have thermometers in them or mere inches away, and various chemicals, all of store brand grade. 

“As the fat renders,” The Riddler pours a chunky liquid through a strainer, ignoring the splashes that hit his shirt, “the tallows float to the surface. Like in Boy Scouts.”

“It’s hard to imagine you as a Boy Scout,” Ed says, stirring a pot like he’s been told. 

“Keep stirring.” Depositing one tub in the fridge, The Riddler fishes another one out, now hardened. “Once the tallow hardens, we skim off a layer of glycerin. If you were to add nitric acid, you got nitroglycerin.” Cigarette smoke obscures The Riddler’s face for a moment, leaving Ed with just the sound of his voice and the implications of his statements, “If you were then to add sodium nitrate and a dash of sawdust, you got dynamite.” He moves around to the sink, turning his back on Ed’s thoughtful expression, “With enough soap, one could blow up just about anything.”

_The Riddler was full of useful information._

“Now,” The Riddler paces the kitchen length, settling down at the opposite side of the table from Ed’s place at the stove, “ancient peoples found that clothes got cleaner when they washed them at a certain point in the river. You know why?”

“No.” When The Riddler gestures for Ed to join him at the table, there is no hesitation in Ed’s mind. He quickly sets the spoon down, and stands directly across from The Riddler, expectant. The other man is putting on thick gloves, the material almost rubber, but more leather in the sound they made when they rubbed together. 

“Because human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river.” Under Ed’s attention, The Riddler flourishes, squeaking the gloves for show, “Bodies burned. Water seeped through the wood and ashes to create lye,” he punctuates himself by putting on a pair of safety goggles and picking up a small plastic jar. “This is lye, the crucial ingredient. Once it mixed with the melted fat of the bodies, a thick, white, soapy discharge crept into the river. May I see your hand, please?” The Riddler sits down, and Ed gives his hand up willingly— he has nothing to fear. With Ed’s hand in his gloved palms, The Riddler licks his lips, makes a whole show of it as spit leaves his mouth slick and glistening. He plants a kiss right on Ed’s hand. 

“What is this?” Suddenly, things do not seem right. 

“This,” The Riddler says, dumping lye onto the wet outline of his mouth on Ed’s hand, “is a chemical burn.” As much as Ed likes to think himself as person with a moderately good handle on his pain, he’s screaming within seconds. “It’ll hurt more than you’ve ever been burned, and you will have a scar.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” 

_If guided meditation worked for cancer, it could work for this._

Ed leaves the kitchen, leaves this earth and ventures out into one made solely of trees and water. 

“Stay with the pain,” The Riddler yells, watching the color drain from Ed’s face, “don’t shove this out.” 

“No,” he can barely breathe, he can see the steam coming off of his skin, “no, no, no! Oh, my god.” In a desperate attempt to get away, Ed lunges further down the table, and The Riddler just moves with him. 

“Look at your hand,” he squeezes Ed’s wrist harshly. “The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes, like the first monkey shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.”

_I tried not to think of the words “sear” or “flesh.”_

“Stop it!” The Riddler is terrifying, so angry and sweaty that he’s fogging up the safety goggles, “This is your pain. This is your burning hand. It’s right here,” he slams Ed’s hand into the table again, as if to remind him.

“I’m going to my cave,” Ed sounds like he might vomit, “I’m going to my cave. I’m gonna find my power animal.” Inside his head, Ed stumbles through icy walkways and darkened caves, where he finds Oswald on a throne of ice in a king’s robes, scepter in hand and there’s smoke, smoke everywhere.

“No! Don’t deal with it the way those dead people do!” Wiggling his left hand, The Riddler does away with one of his gloves and puts his bare hand on Ed’s wrist. “Come on.”

“I get the point, okay, please!” 

“No,” he leans in, as if he’s feeding on every desperate tear that comes out of Ed’s eyes, “what you’re feeling is premature enlightenment.” 

Once more, Ed reverts back into his own mind. He leans over Oswald in his throne, hand on his hip and face dangerously close; he can feel the tip of Oswald’s nose on his cheek. Then, Oswald blows out smoke into his face, and Ed is choking. When he comes back to the kitchen, The Riddler is slapping him across the face. 

“This is the greatest moment of your life, man,” he says, voice hitting harsh limits, “and you’re off somewhere missing it!” 

“I am not—“ Ed throws himself down the table again, knocking bowls and containers off of the end. 

“Shut up. Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed,” The Riddler sounds so calm, so entirely collected as he watches Ed sob, “what does that tell you about God?” 

“No, no—“ The Riddler hits him again, an open palm across the side of his face. 

“Listen to me,” he sheds the safety goggles, throwing them somewhere offside and out of Ed’s vision. “You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, and he never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.”

“It isn’t?”

“We don’t need him.”

“We don’t! I agree!” 

“Fuck damnation,” The Riddler is up in Ed’s face in that same, stupid autumn leaf print shirt. “Fuck redemption. We are God’s unwanted children? So be it!” When Ed slides further down the table, The Riddler pulls Ed closer. “Listen, you can run water over your hand to make it worse, or— Look at me! You can use vinegar to neutralize the burn.” 

“Please,” Ed has never heard himself sound so goddamn desperate, “let me have it. Please!”

“First, you have to give up. First you have to know, not fear, know that someday, you’re gonna die.”

“You don’t know how this feels!” 

The Riddler holds his hand up, showing off a matching puckered mark on his hand, horrifying in its own right. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything,” he says, putting his head in his hand, “that we’re free to do anything.” 

“Okay,” Ed manages, clenching his fist and looking up at The Riddler with as much determination as he can muster. The Riddler lets go of his wrist, watches as Ed shakes, sweats so much that the neck of his shirt is soaked. Finally— he douses Ed’s hand in vinegar. The sizzling stops instantly, and as Ed drops to the floor, cradling his burned hand to his chest, the entire kitchen starts to smell like a salad. 

“Congratulations,” The Riddler doesn’t smile, just stares at Ed from the tabletop, “you’re one step closer to hitting bottom.” 

_The Riddler sold his soap to department stores at twenty dollars a bar. God knows what they charged._

Even when he’s dressed up, The Riddler looks barely professional. He mixes dark green slacks and a matching jacket that doesn’t fit him right, wearing a shirt that borders on neon underneath. His tie looks like it was stolen right out of a thrift store garbage bin, and the slacks don’t fit him well enough that his hip bones aren’t peeking out from below the hem of his shirt. 

Ed stands aside, bandage on his hand and sunglasses over his bruised eyes. 

“This is the best soap,” the woman behind the counter at Macy’s tells The Riddler, signing a delivery form.

“Why, thank you, Cheryl,” The Riddler says, leaning even more comfortably on the counter. 

_It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them._

Back at work, Ed almost feels trapped behind his desk. Even the clear walls of his cubicle can’t help the feeling; he wants to get up and run, get up and do something. Jim comes walking up, stack of papers in hand.

He was wearing his yellow tie. I didn’t even wear a tie to work anymore. 

“The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club,” Jim reads off of the paper in his hand, stopping Ed clear through the middle of his work.

 _I’m half a sleep again. I must’ve left the original in the copy machine._  

“The second rule of Fight Club—“ rolling his eyes, Jim looks up from the paper and considers Ed with the most annoyance he’s ever shown, “is this yours?” 

“Huh?”

“Pretend you’re me,” Jim says, loosening up, “make a managerial decision: You find this. What would you do?” 

For a moment, Ed thinks about cowering and admitting to everything. He thinks about the way he could grovel, the things he could say, and the mathematical probability that Jim would forgive him for it all— then, he leans back in his chair, and he feels confident. 

“Well, I gotta tell you,” Ed says, putting his cigarette out in the ash tray he’s put on his desk, “I’d be very, vey careful who you talk to about that. Because the person who wrote that,” gesturing with his wounded hand, Ed finds it very easy to pretend he isn’t in pain, “is dangerous.” He sits up in his chair and gets a sick satisfaction from the look on Jim’s face, “And this buttoned-down, oxford cloth psycho might just snap,” he stands up from his chair, advancing on Jim, “and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semiautomatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and coworkers.” Jim has never looked more terrified, more disgusted and offended, “This might be someone you’ve known for years, someone very, very close to you.”

_The Riddler’s words coming out of my mouth. And I used to be such a nice guy._

Ed snatches the paper out of Jim’s hands, staring him down with an expression that’s almost entirely empty, “Or maybe you just shouldn’t bring me every little piece of trash you happen to pick up.” The phone on Ed’s desk rings, insistent and loud in the silence of his conversation with him, “Compliance and Liability,” he answers.

“My dick’s gonna rot off.” Oswald. What a pleasant surprise. 

“Will you excuse me,” Ed asks, far too condescending, “I need to take this.” And Jim leaves, absolutely bewildered. “What are you talking about?” 

“I need you to check and see if there’s a lump in my balls.”

“Go to a hospital,” he says, ducking his head closer to his computer, as not to be heard.

“I can’t afford to throw money away on a doctor,” Oswald sounds so desperate, so genuinely worried. 

“I don’t know about this, Oswald.” 

“Please?” The voice is barely Oswald’s, tiny and bordering on begging. He’d do it if Ed asked. 

_He didn’t call The Riddler. I’m neutral in his book._

When Ed walks up on Oswald’s apartment building, he finds Oswald rooting through the back of the Meals on Wheels van, carrying two trays. “That’s nice,” Ed snarks, reaching out to touch the tags on the boxes. “Taking food to Mrs. Hannaburr, Mrs. Raines? Where are they, exactly?”

“Tragically,” Oswald balances the boxes on one hand so that he can hold his cigarette in the other, “they’re dead. I’m alive, and I’m in poverty. You want any?”

“No, thank you.”

“I got one for you.”

“Thanks for the thought,” Ed doesn’t really mean it, but he waves it all off. 

“What happened to your hand?” In looking back at Ed, Oswald nearly hits the railing of the stairwell. 

“Oh, nothing.” 

In Oswald’s apartment, it’s one of the most painfully uncomfortable experiences Ed has ever had. He assumes Oswald is just as uncomfortable, because his skin is cold to the touch and he can’t bring himself to speak full sentences. 

Then again, it’s not everyday you have someone else’s hand on your testicles in an entirely nonsexual situation. 

“Right there?” Ed asks, chewing on his bottom lip. 

“Do you feel anything?” 

“No,” and maybe Ed doesn’t sound convincing enough, because Oswald drops his head and grumbles. 

“Well, make sure.” 

“Okay,” he tries to make it seem like he knows what he’s doing, but he really doesn’t. He read a step by step guide on the bus ride over. “I’m pretty sure.” 

“You don’t feel anything?” 

“No, nothing.” In the mirror that sits above the vanity Oswald has been leaning his elbows on, Ed can see both his and Oswald’s faces. When he stands up, one hand on his hip, the setting almost seems domestic. 

“Well, that’s a relief,” Oswald sees the reflection too, sees just how safe Ed could be, “thank you.” He fixes his pants, shimmying them over his hips. 

“I mean, it’s no problem.”

“Wish I could return the favor,” the flirtation is weak as Oswald fixes his belt, taking one step closer to Ed. 

“There’s not a lot of testicular cancer in the men in my family.”

“Funny. Could check your prostate.” 

“Uh,” Ed fumbles, blinking quickly and pushing up his glasses, “I think I’m okay.” 

“Well, thanks anyway.” When Oswald leans in and kisses Ed, careful against his lips as if he’s worried he’ll be tossed away, something inside of Ed’s chest hurts. And then there’s confusion. And then there’s anger, because this has to be some kind of joke. 

“Are we done?” He asks, face schooled into emotionlessness. 

“Yeah,” Oswald says tiredly, “we’re done. See you— around.” 

Uncomfortable, Ed leaves Oswald’s apartment without looking back. He trots down the stairs and stops in the sidewalk, looking up at Oswald’s window until he decides he has no business doing that. Oswald isn’t his, and he doesn’t want him to be. 

“Cornelius?” Further down the sidewalk, Ed hears someone’s voice that sounds so familiar, but he doesn’t turn around. “Cornelius!” When he finally musters up the courage, Ed is face to face with Butch, arms full of donuts and half-drunk sodas. “It’s me— Butch!” 

“Hey, Butch,” Ed doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to deal with this, but when Butch licks every single one of his fingers and then hauls Ed into a hug, there’s no escaping. 

“We all thought you were dead,” Butch explains, staring at Ed as though he shouldn’t even be there. 

“No, no. Still here.” Ed laughs because he doesn’t want to turn the statement into something morbid. “How are you, Butch?” 

“Better than I’ve ever been in my whole life.” 

“Really?” He can’t help but be surprised, considering the fact that Butch seemed the least likely to die of his cancer, and more likely to end up with his brains splattered against the back wall of his shitty, one-bedroom apartment. “You still remaining men together?” 

“No, no,” Butch’s smile practically splits his face, “I’ve got something so much better now.” 

“Really? What is it?” Maybe a new type of medication, a new experimental form of radiation? Ed hasn’t read a journal on medicine in months, he lost his subscription in the condo fire. 

“Well, the first rule is I’m not supposed to talk about it.” The smile is gone, replaced with giddiness that’s mostly unguarded, “And the second rule is I’m not supposed to talk about it. And the third rule is—“

“Butch,” Ed has to stop him, pointing to his face and the bruising around his eye, “I’m a member. Look at my face, Butch.” 

Butch lets out this awful, wheezing laugh, “That’s fucking—“ he quickly lowers his voice, hand over his mouth, “That’s fucking great.”

“I’ve never seen you there,” and Ed would notice something like this.

“I go Tuesdays and Thursdays.” 

“I go Saturday.” 

“Congratulations!” 

“Yeah,” Ed wants to be happy, but something strange sits unpleasantly in his stomach. “Hey, to both of us, right?” 

“Have you heard about the guy that invented this thing?” 

“Well, uh, yeah, actually. I—“

“I hear all kinds of things.” 

“Yeah?” Ed eggs him on, like a gossipy teenager.

“Supposedly,” Butch leans in, careful not to spill his donuts, “he was born in a mental institution. And he sleeps only one hour a night. He’s a great man.” 

“Oh, gosh—“

“Do you know about The Riddler?” And oh, god, does it sound strange hearing that name in someone else’s mouth. He decides to just let it go. 

Fighting with Butch is surreal. He has so much muscle hidden underneath the hormone induced breasts and the extremity of his physique. Even when Ed can get a few punches in, Butch just bounces back, and once he has Ed in a chokehold, it’s over. 

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” He asks, walking Ed out of the bar at the end of the night. 

“Actually,” the blood in Ed’s nose makes him sound especially dorky, “you did.”

“Thank you for this,” Butch definitely didn’t hear a word he said, “thank you, thank you, thank you.” 

_Fight Club. This was mine and The Riddler’s gift, our gift to the world._

“Look around, look around,” The Riddler sheds his jacket in the dirty basement, cigarette between his lips, staring out at a sea of men, “I see a lot of new faces.” The men laugh, The Riddler doesn’t. “Shut up— This means a lot of you have been breaking the first two rules of Fight Club.” Men in the crowd look warily to one another, and Ed feels just as confused as they do, because he and The Riddler definitely didn’t talk about this speech on the way over. “I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived,” The Riddler says, and Ed just knows he’s including himself, “I see all this potential. And I see it squandered. Goddamn, an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables. Slaves with white collars,” he turns himself around in a circle, demands the attention of everyone around him, because that’s just what he does. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place— We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war’s a spiritual war. Our great depression,” pause for effect, “is our lives.” As he lets his words sink in The Riddler meanders his way across the cardboard mat, purposefully unsteady on his feet, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t, and we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” As the men agree, yelling loudly and clapping, The Riddler rearranges himself to the front of the room, right in front of the door. “The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about—“

And the door comes open, loud like a streetcar bomb, two men coming down with an air of anger and cheap cologne. 

“Who are you?” The Riddler asks, although his tone does not convey that he cares very much to know. 

“Who am I?” Of the two men, the older one does the talking, lumbering all six feet of himself down the stairs. “There’s a sign in the front that says Carmine’s,” he says, standing just a few feet from The Riddler, “I’m Carmine. Who the fuck are you?”

“The Riddler,” and there’s a dramatic flourish of his hand that goes with it, lifts the hem of his shirt up to show that troublesome hipbone again. 

“Who told you motherfuckers that you could use my place?” 

“We have a deal worked out with Harvey.”

“Harvey?” When The Riddler nods, Carmine shakes his head, “Harvey’s at home with a broken collarbone. He doesn’t own this place, I do. How much money is he getting for this?” 

“There is no money,” he says, reaching up to hang onto a piece of piping.

“Really?”

“Free to all.” 

“Isn’t that something.”

“It is, actually.”

“Look, stupid fuck,” Carmine advances on The Riddler and continues to do so when there’s no fear response, “I want everybody out of here right now.” 

“Hey,” The Riddler says softly, surprisingly level-headed, “you should join our club.” 

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“You, and your friend,” he nods at the other man, not quite as tall but much more severe, holding a gun.

Without a moment’s notice, Carmine rears back and punches The Riddler right in his stomach. “You hear me now?” 

“No, I didn’t quite catch that, Carmine.” This time, the punch comes square to The Riddler’s mouth, so hard that he spits out blood seconds later, “Still not getting it.” Carmine takes The Riddler by the hair, punching him in the nose, “Okay, okay, okay, I got it,” he has his hands up, guarding his face, and then he drops them, “Shit. I lost it.” When The Riddler hits the floor this time, after having been punched again, the entire circle of men tries to come in around him. Both The Riddler and Carmine’s man with a gun gesture for them to step back. Then, he starts laughing. The Riddler starts laughing, awful and caustic, one hand extended out past Carmine, right toward Ed. Ed holds still, stacks back, stays away, because he’s been told to. “Aw, Carmine,” The Riddler says, pointing a finger at him, “come on, man. We really like this place.” Carmine kicks him in the stomach, so hard that he swings backward and lands on his back, laughing hysterically as soon as the air comes back into his lungs. “That’s right, Carmine,” he says, laughing even harder when Carmine stands over him and holds him by the collar of his shirt, “get it out.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Every time Carmine punches him, it seems like The Riddler laughs louder, laughs harder, despite the blood pooling in the back of his throat and around his lips, dripping from his nose, “Think that’s funny?” Finally, Carmine punches him hard enough that The Riddler’s head hits the floor, stopping him from laughing just long enough for Carmine to stand up and fix his hair. “Fucking guy’s a loony,” he says to his gunman, “I’m telling you. Unbelievable.” 

The Riddler launches himself up and onto Carmine, getting him on his back and spitting blood into his face. “Carmine,” he screams, laughing and shaking his head, coughing out blood and bits of teeth, “you don’t know where I’ve been, Carmine!” The gunman has The Riddler by his legs, pulling and pulling but he just won’t let go of the front of Carmine’s suit. “Carmine! Let us keep it, Carmine!” In the back of the crowd, someone vomits into an empty drum, loose and mostly made of beer— others can’t look. The Riddler spits another mouthful of blood, thick and hot, and Carmine tries to scramble away.

“Use the basement! Okay!” 

“I want your word, Carmine! I want your word!” 

“On my mother’s honor,” and then The Riddler lets go. He lets himself be dragged off of Carmine’s chest, and watches with sick satisfaction as the man runs away. 

“Thanks, Carmine,” he says tiredly, rolling onto his back. “You too, big guy,” and he waves at the gunman. “We’ll see you next week!” 

Men circle around The Riddler, Ed walking alongside him, dragging him over to a dripping pipe that can rinse the blood away. “This week,” he says, spitting onto the cement, “each one of you has a homework assignment.” It takes him a few tries, but he eventually gets a cigarette out of his pack and into his mouth. “You’re gonna go out, and you’re gonna start a fight with a total stranger,” someone else lights it for him, without him asking, “you’re gonna start a fight and you’re gonna lose.” 

 _Now, this is not as easy as it sounds. Most people— normal people— do just about anything to avoid a fight._  

Ed bothers to knock on Jim’s door, despite the fact that it’s open. His hand is still bandaged, clothes rumpled but at least devoid of blood stains. He hasn’t even smoked, today. “We need to talk,” he says, closing the door behind himself. 

“Okay,” Jim says, taking his reading glasses off and leveling Ed with a halfhearted glare. “Where to begin? With your constant absenteeism? With your unpresentable appearance? You’re up for review, you know.” 

“I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise,” Ed says, shaking his head. 

“What?” 

“Let’s pretend,” he starts, unduly confident. “You’re the department of transportation, okay?” Jim does nothing to indicate that he’s following the line of logic that Ed is putting down, but Ed continues anyway, “Someone informs you that this company installs front seat mounting brackets that never pass collision tests, brake linings that fail after a thousand miles, and fuel injectors that explode and burn people alive. What then?” 

“Are you threatening me?” 

“No—“

“This is unacceptable, you need to leave. You’re fired.” 

“I have a better solution,” Ed says calmly, folding his hands in his lap, “you keep me on the payroll as an outside consultant. And in exchange for my salary, my job will be never to tell people these things that I know. I don’t even have to come into the office, I can do this job from home.” 

“What—“ Jim is bewildered, almost overwhelmed by his anger, “Who do you think you are?” And as Jim goes to dial security on his phone, to humanely euthanize Ed’s career, Ed feels his hand shaking. The fingers form into a fist and he isn’t sure why this is happening and before he can even bother to be afraid—

_I am Jack’s smirking revenge._

The hand comes into contact with Ed’s nose. He’s punched himself in the face, thrown himself right out of the chair. “What the hell are you doing?” Ed asks, looking at Jim with eyes wild with terror, glasses somewhere offside after being knocked off of his face. Ed punches himself in the chin, stumbling back and falling through the perfectly modernist, all glass coffee table. “That hurt,” Ed comments, almost offhandedly, sitting upright in the shattered glass pieces, “why would you do that?” He scrambles, scoots back through the pieces, “Oh, my god. No! Please, stop!” Ed pulls himself across the room by the front of his shirt, ripping buttons from their perfect little spots, and Jim looks on horrified. “What are you doing?” When Ed stops in front of Jim, hand still wrapped up in the neck of his shirt while the other wrestles against the wrist, he nervously looks back toward the glass-shelved unit behind him, “Oh, God, no! Please! No!”

_For some reason, I thought of my first fight with The Riddler._

“No!” As Ed goes flying backward, he crashes through every single perfectly measured glass shelf on the way down, tugging items off of the cases on either side of him. At the bottom, he sits there, dumbstruck, until his hand comes back up and goes to town on his nose and mouth; blood splatters with every impact. He falls over, crawls through the broken glass and up over the perfect white chairs, seeping blood and dropping glass shards like glitter. With every step he makes toward Jim, Jim takes two backward, until he bumps up against his desk. 

 _Under and behind and inside everything this man took for granted, something horrible had been growing._  

Ed meets Jim, pulls himself up by his pants leg until he can hold Jim’s rough hands with his own bloody ones, “Now, look,” he says, voice nasally and eyes unfocused. “Just give me the paychecks like I asked, and you won’t ever seen me again.”

_And right then, at our most excellent moment together—_

As soon as the security guards rush in, Ed drops Jim’s hands and crumples to the floor, sobbing, “Oh, thank God,” he sounds so much smaller now, so much weaker. “Please don’t hit me again! Please!”

_Telephone, computer, fax machine. Fifty-two weekly paychecks and forty-eight airline flight coupons._

Ed walks the hallway from his old cubicle, electronics piled high in a mail cart to make it easier to wheel out in one trip. He whistles, despite the blood coming down his face and neck, despite the terrified looks from his coworkers. 

_We now had corporate sponsorship. This is how The Riddler and I were able to have Fight Club every night of the week._

Back in the basement, it feels like more men are closing in on every fight, the smell of sweat and skin permeating past the smell of dust and old beer. 

_Now, nobody was the center of Fight Club except the two men fighting. The leader walked through the crowd, out in the darkness. The Riddler was now in a class action lawsuit with the Crown Hotel over the urine content of their soup._

_I am Jack’s wasted life._

At the end of the night, Ed and The Riddler stand side by side as The Riddler hands out manilla envelopes, cigarette dangling from his lips. Each of the men linger on his hand, revel in the tiny bit of attention they get from the man himself.

_The Riddler dreamed up new homework assignments. He handed them out in sealed envelopes._

Somewhere across town, men crawl across rooftops like cockroaches and dismantle every cable antenna they can find. They rip them off of the roof, tossing them to the ground, they beat at them with steel-toed work boots or baseball bats, watching the tiny, crumbled plastic parts hit the pavement sixteen stories below. A group of six men walk through a Blockbuster Video, running a machine over the rentals to render them useless, completely silent as though they were perusing their options for a boys night in. Men work under the shadow of night to change a billboard, “ _Did You Know? You can use old motor oil to fertilize your lawn!”_ With seconds to spare before a car comes rolling by, The Riddler and Ed exchange a piece of a speed bump with tire spikes. 

“Did you know there’s a Fight Club up in Metropolis?” Ed asks, hiking his backpack up onto his shoulder. 

“Yeah, I heard,” handing over a baseball bat, The Riddler teams up with Ed to hit both headlights on a car as they walk away from the tire spikes. 

“There’s one in Penn’s Grove too—“

“Leave it,” The Riddler points at the next car they pass. 

“Butch even found one up in Bludhaven.”

“Yeah,” he points across the parking lane at Ed, “did you start that one?”

“No,” Ed comes to a stop in front of a new car, shiny and black, “I thought you did.”

“Nah.” They both get a good look at the car in front of them, a Volkswagen Beetle, and share a good laugh before going to town on the headlights. Behind them, a car goes over the tire spikes, and the two go running. 

On top of a car dealership, two men feed the pigeons so well and so nicely that the birds don’t even fear those near them. They come up, practically hopping on the men’s hands. In the morning, ever car is covered in bird shit, foul and disgusting. An airplane custodian replaces the usual emergency exit maneuver pamphlets with new ones, where the people are screaming and the plane cabin is in flames. 

The Riddler clips newspaper articles, tiny little ones. “Performance artist ‘Molested’”, “Missing monkeys found shaved!”, “Police seize ‘Excrement Catapult’”. He pins them up on a cork board, putting them up where they can be seen, like a proud mother with her child’s artwork or good grades. 

At the nicest electronics store in town, two men work their way through the window display of computer monitors, filling each one with gasoline. 

“Stop for a second,” The Riddler says, standing with Ed outside of a convenience store, “turn around.”

“What are we doing?” Ed does as he’s told, giving The Riddler access to his backpack. 

“Homework assignment.”

“What kind of homework assignment?”

“Human sacrifice,” he pulls a gun out of the backpack, heading toward the store. 

“Hey, is that a gun?” Ed follows closely after him, keeping his voice low but not bothering to mask his panic, “Please— please tell me that’s not a gun.” 

“It’s a gun."

“What are you doing?”

“Meet me in the back.”

“No, no,” Ed grabs The Riddler by his arm as he’s about to open the front door, “hey, don’t fuck around. This isn’t—“

“Meet me in the back,” and he’s gone inside. 

_On a long enough timeline—_

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he runs around the back of the store, just in time to watch The Riddler push somebody, weeping and gasping, out of the back door. “Stop! What are you doing? Come on.”

_—the survival rate for everyone drops to zero._

“Hands behind your back,” The Riddler says, gun trained to the back of the man’s head as he drops to his knees. “Give me your wallet.” The man obliges, because of course he does, why wouldn’t he? Ed looks on in abject disgust mixed with discomfort and terror. He might vomit. “Jervis B. Tetch,” he reads off of the man’s ID, “25423 West Boulevard, apartment W. Small, cramped basement apartment, Jervis?”

“How did you know?” Jervis asks, entire body shaking like it might be blown away by the gentlest nudge. 

“Because they give shitty basement apartments letters instead of numbers,” The Riddler drops the wallet, preens under the small laugh Ed gives at the statement of fact. “Jervis, you’re going to die.” 

“Oh, no, please—“

“Is that your sister in here?”

“Alice—“

“Alice is going to have to call up kindly Dr. So-and-so to pick up your dental records,” The Riddler tells him, considering the photo of the sister again. She doesn’t look happy. “Wanna know why?” Jervis doesn’t answer. The again, The Riddler doesn’t quite want him to. “Because there’s not going to be anything left of your face.” All Jervis can do is whimper, a pathetic, keening sound, no too unlike a dog howling in the night. 

“Come on,” Ed tells The Riddler, practically pouting, “come on!”

“An expired community college student ID,” The Riddler observes, turning back to the gun in hand. “What’d you study, Jervis?”

“S-stuff.”

“Stuff?” He asks incredulously, so dramatically that Ed is brought to laugh himself, “Were the midterms hard?” When there’s no response, only more whimpering, The Riddler smacks Jervis on the top of the head with the gun, “I asked you what you studied!”

“Biology, mostly.” 

“Why?”

“I— I don’t know.”

“What did you want to be, Jervis B. Tetch?” In the silence that follows, The Riddler pulls the hammer back on the gun, lets the click resound in the quiet alleyway. He doesn’t look back at Ed, because he knows Ed’s humanity is gnawing on the edges of his mind. “The question, Jervis, was what did you want to be?”

“Answer him, Jervis! Jesus!” And for some reason, that spurns words out of Jervis’ mouth. 

“Doctor! I wanted to be a doctor! A neurosurgeon!” 

“Brains!” The Riddler sounds so delighted. 

“Yeah, brain s-s—“

“Stuff. Yeah, I got that part,” he loosens his grip on the gun, just a bit. “That means you have to get more schooling.”

“Too much school,” Jervis supplies. 

“I mean,” The Riddler deliberates openly, drawling his words, “would you rather be dead?” 

“No!” 

“Would you rather die, here, on your knees, in the back of a convenience store?” As he sits there, weeping, Jervis does a half-assed job of begging for his life. After a while, The Riddler finally releases the hammer on the gun and puts it into his waistband. “I’m keeping your license,” he says flippantly, “I’m gonna check in on you. I know where you live. If you’re not on your way to becoming a neurosurgeon in six weeks, you will be dead.” Just the sentence itself makes Jervis whine, flinching visibly when The Riddler throws his wallet at the back of his head, “Now run on home,” and run he does. “Run, Forrest, run!” 

“I feel ill,” Ed says, instead of laughing at The Riddler’s movie quote humor. 

“Imagine how he feels.” 

“Come on,” he breaks, running hands through his hair, “this isn’t funny! That wasn’t funny. What the fuck was the point of that?” 

“Tomorrow,” The Riddler begins with an unsettling amount of clarity, “will be the most beautiful day of Jervis B. Tetch’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.”

 _You had to give it to him. He had a plan._  

The Riddler tosses Ed the gun, gesturing for him to follow. Ed turns the weapon over in his hands, marvels at the weight of it. He tips the chamber, sees that there are no bullets inside— there never were. 

_And it started to make sense, in a Riddler sort of way. No fear, no distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide._

The display computer screens from earlier in the night, all perfect and shiny and filled with gasoline that came at $2.15 a gallon go up in flames. In a grotesque mockery of a fireworks show, the different screens go up at different times, exploding and breaking the glass of the window, burning up the fake office background they’re seated on. 

“You are not your job,” The Riddler says, standing in the basement of their run down house, “you are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

And the next morning, Oswald comes down the stairs with a cigarette in his mouth, sucking in a breath when he sees Ed at the table. “I’ll be out of your way in a second,” he says, tiredly, as he fiddles with the stovetop. 

“You don’t have to go,” Ed tries, biting the inside of his own lip. He’s finally starting to feel bad for being so rude to Oswald all this time. The man looks frailer these days, weaker, dressed less dramatically and acting far quieter. 

“Whatever.” 

“No, I mean, uh— It’s okay.” As Oswald rinses out a mug in the sink, Ed considers what sounds like construction noises in the basement. When it stops, he considers the back of Oswald’s figure. “You still going to groups?” 

“Yeah,” Oswald says, putting out the cigarette wherever. “Chloe’s dead.” 

“Wow,” Ed says, blinking, “Chloe. When did that happen?”

“Do you care?” 

“I don’t know,” he admits, “I haven’t thought about it in a while.” 

“Yeah, well, it was the smart move on her part.” 

“Hey, listen, um—“ Ed leans back in his chair, tries to turn the subject anywhere else, “What are you getting out of all this?” 

“What?” Oswald finally moves through the kitchen and turns around, perching on the sink just enough that his bad leg is up off the ground. 

“I mean, all this. Why do you keep—“ As he struggles to find the right word, he gestures vaguely with his hand, “Is this making you happy?” 

“Sometimes.” 

“I don’t know. I don’t understand,” Ed looks down at his bruised hands as they gesticulate. “I mean, why does a weaker person need to latch on to a strong person? What is that?”

“What do you get out of it?” What Ed thinks Oswald means is his relationship with The Riddler. What does Ed get from being so strongly latched to The Riddler’s hip and— Did Oswald just call him weak, in a roundabout way? 

“No,” he says firmly, “that’s not the same thing at all. It’s totally different with us. We’re— We’re—“

“Us?” Oswald questions, raising his voice when Ed turns his head. “What do you mean by ‘us’?”

“I’m sorry,” Ed turns toward the door to the basement, “Do you hear this?”

“Hear what?” What hurts is just how worried Oswald looks as Ed peers around for the source of whatever it is he hears. 

“You’re not hearing all that noise?” Ed looks in the living room, “Just give me a second.”

“No, wait,” Oswald pushes. “What were you saying? Don’t change the subject. I want to talk about this.” 

When Ed pushes the door to the basement open, The Riddler is down there, hammer in hand and wood all over the place, “You’re not talking about me, are you?” 

“No,” Ed assures, looking back to Oswald, “What?”

“That day you came over to my place to play doctor— What was going on there?” 

“What are you talking about?” The Riddler asks, looking up from the bottom of the stairs harshly. 

“Nothing,” Ed tells him, then looks back to Oswald, “Nothing.” 

“I don’t think so,” Oswald stands in front of Ed, effectively pinning him against the doorframe to the basement— no escape. 

“Come on. What do you want?” 

“Look at me.” 

“No. What— no.”

“Look at me.”

“No—“ 

“What is that?” Oswald asks, looking at the puckered scar on the hand Ed has perched up on the doorframe.

“It’s nothing,” Ed drops his hand, “don’t worry about it.” 

“Oh, my god,” up close, Oswald’s voice has so much more nuance and feels so much nicer when it’s laced with worry and not cyanide. He holds Ed’s wounded hand with a surprising amount of care, pad of his thumb ghosting over the scar tissue. “Who did this to you?” 

“A person.” 

“Guy or a girl?” 

“What do you care if it’s a guy or a girl?” Ed puffs up his chest, moving in closer to Oswald. 

“What do you care if I ask?” Oswald does the same, but it doesn’t hold quite the same effect with his lacking height. 

“It’s none of your business. Leave me alone.” 

“You’re afraid to say it.”

“I am not afraid to say— Let me go.” 

“No! Fucking talk to me.”

“Let go of me. Leave me alone.” 

 _“This conversation—”_ The Riddler whispers, watching as Ed closes the door to the basement.

“This conversation—“ Ed parrots, with just a little more sass.

_“—is over.”_

“—is over,” and Ed slams the basement door, nearly bumping chests with Oswald. 

For a second, it looks like Oswald wants to cry, chewing on the inside of his lip. Then, he steels, putting his head up high and breathing in slowly, “I just can’t win with you, can I?” He makes himself scarce in a huff, walking out the back door as Ed rushes down the basement stairs to find bunk beds built crudely out of two-by-fours. 

“You know, this is getting a little old—“ The doorbell rings, but Ed is too busy looking at all the beds that The Riddler has apparently managed to build. “What is all this?”

“What do you think?” The Riddler asks, chewing on an apple as he takes the stairs up two at a time. 

“Hey,” Ed asks, almost like an annoyed parent, “why do we need bunk beds?” When The Riddler doesn’t answer, Ed follows him, “Hey!” 

On the porch, The Riddler considers a young man dressed in all black, a pile of things sitting beside him. He tosses his apple core away, still chewing on the meat of it, “Too young. Sorry.” And he walks right back into the house. 

“What’s all that? What—“ 

“Right,” The Riddler turns around, looking at Ed and swallowing before finally speaking. “If the applicant is young, tell him he’s too young. Old, too old. Fat, too fat.” 

“Applicant?” 

“If the applicant then waits for three days without food, shelter or encouragement, he may then enter and begin his training.” 

Ed nods, but then goes following after The Riddler again, “Training for what?” 

Not more than twenty minutes later, Ed comes walking out of the front door and gets right up in the young man’s face, “You think this is a game? You’re too young to train here. End of story. Now quit wasting our time, get the fuck out of here.” 

That night, The Riddler comes out and moves in close to the young man, “Bad news, friend,” he walks a circle around him, stopping far too close to his ear, “it’s not gonna happen. I’m sorry if there was a misunderstanding. Uh,” The Riddler rubs his nose, watching as the boy stands perfectly still, “it’s not the end of the world. Just go away.” Around him, leaves flutter around him, a cold breeze building up for the night, “Go. Because you are trespassing, and I will have to call the police.” 

In his pajamas, Ed rounds on the same kid, the both of them shivering in the dark. “Don’t you look at me. Do you think you’re ever getting in this house? You’re never getting in this fucking house.” Ed pulls his arms back, raising a broom to the boy, “Never. Now get the fuck off my porch,” she brings the broom down on his shins, barely enough to hurt the first time, but surely painful as he continues, “go!”

_Sooner or later, we all became what The Riddler wanted us to be._

The Riddler watches Ed from a window, watches as he wields the broom like a sword. “Now,” he tells the kid, “I’m gonna go inside and I’m gonna get a fucking shovel.”

On the morning of the fourth day, Ed follows The Riddler out onto the porch. The boy is still standing there, eyes trained straight ahead, even as The Riddler closes in on him. “You got two black shirts?”

“Sir.”

“Two pair black pants?”

“Yes, sir.”

“One pair black boots?”

“Sir.” 

“Two pair black socks?”

“Sir.”

“One black jacket?”

“Sir.”

“Three-hundred dollars of personal burial money?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Alright,” and The Riddler lets the boy into the house, watches him scurry inside with his little duffel bag at his side, and walks up to the new applicant. It’s Butch, and when The Riddler laughs at him, every bit of confidence seems to drain from his face, “You’re too old, fat man,” he says, “and your tits are too big. Get the fuck off my porch.” The Riddler goes inside, flinging his cigarette somewhere off in the grass, not even turning around to see Butch pick his things up and walk away. 

“Butch,” Ed jogs after him as he goes down the steps, “Butch, listen—“ and Ed picks up Butch’s duffel bag, patting his arm amicably as he guides him back onto the porch, explaining the rules to him. He tells him not to be discouraged, to just wait it out, it’ll be fine. The Riddler is off somewhere else, watching the new boy shave his head in the upstairs bathroom, hair dropping into the sink. 

“Like a monkey ready to be shot into space,” The Riddler says, smacking the back of the boy’s newly bald head, “space money. Ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good.”

“You’re too fucking old, fatty!” The new boy has been put on porch duty, which Ed watches diligently from the bedroom window up above. He screams at Butch, and Butch takes it as best he can, making occasional eye contact with Ed in the window. “And you—“ new boy comes up on another applicant, a pretty little face with bright red hair, “you’re too fucking _ginger!_ ” He turns on his heel, heading back inside of the house, but turns around at the doorway threshold, “Get out of here, the both of you!” The inflection that he puts on his voice is strained, an attempt at sounding smarter than he truly is, at trying to force a tone that isn’t his own.

_And so it went._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have many things i want to say, but very few of them seem relevant aha;;;
> 
> personally, the human sacrifice scene was one of my favorites to write. it comes in second only to the "near-life" experience, which i believe comes in the next chapter. 
> 
> anyway— thanks for reading.
> 
> talk to me on tumblr! i'm [ mayor-crumblepot ](https://mayor-crumblepot.tumblr.com)


	4. Chapter 4

Over a megaphone, out into the backyard where various men are working; planting a garden, shoveling gravel, moving whatever needs to be moved, the Riddler’s voice is guiding them, more or less. “Listen up, maggots. You are not special,” he tells them, somehow managing to inject bravado into the simplest of sentences. “You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Inside the house, Ed watches cluelessly.

_The Riddler built himself an army._

“We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world,” The Riddler says, and Ed takes his time surveying the people in his kitchen. Butch is sweeping, looking almost comedic in an apron, and the redhead, their second applicant, is scrubbing enthusiastically at the dated cooktop. “We are all part of the same compost heap,” maybe it’s because Ed has heard the words so many times over, or maybe it’s because he knows The Riddler so well, but he finds it hard to believe that so many people have put stock into the little speeches he gives. The Riddler spouts the same several phrases every time, surrounding them in different types of fluff that works depending on the audience. Ed supposes that’s why he and The Riddler are leading, and why all of these other people are following. 

_Why was The Riddler building an army? To what purpose? For what greater good?_

Ed scrambles off of a city bus, pulling his bag back over his shoulder. He comes up on the house, and despite coming to be used to the people that are now residing within it, he’s still stricken by the sounds of _life_ inside. 

And still, no Oswald.

_In The Riddler we trusted._

“No, no, man, listen,” in the living room, seven men are sitting in a circle on mismatched furniture, “when he was like ‘ _You are not your job_ ,’ I was like, _‘Yeah!’_ I mean— _Fuck_ yeah!” Ed considers them, offers a terse smile and a nod, and continues on into the kitchen, where he finds the Riddler pulling mostly-cold beers from the fridge.

“Hey,” and it’s all painfully domestic, “what’s all this?” The Riddler laughs, cigarette between his lips, and sets the beers down so that he can hug Ed enthusiastically, “Okay!” Ed returns the gesture, feels the wind knocked out of him, “What’s going on?”

“Go on in,” he pushes two six packs into Ed’s arms, “we’re celebrating.” When Ed gets a good look at him, he realizes that The Riddler’s arms and neck are covered in splotches of green paint, little flecks settling into the ridges of the chemical burn on his hand.

“What are we celebrating?”

“Go on,” is all The Riddler tells him, and Ed follows orders. From the moment Ed enters the room, he realizes that there’s a vague shift in the dynamic, and he wonders what for. Maybe it’s because he’s dressed so differently, maybe it’s because they think he’ll rat them out to The Riddler for breaking rank without him around— the redhead is up on his feet, unintentionally right up in his personal space.

“Here,” he takes the cans, holding them close to his chest in order to balance them all, “let me get this for you.” And as the boy passes the beers around— Ed wonders, idly, if the boy is even _old_ enough to drink —the rest of the men settle in and watch a breaking news announcement. 

“Investigators are on the scene right now— Hold on. Police Commissioner Loeb has just arrived,” the reporter scurries across the steps of a building, nondescript in its mediocrity. “Commissioner, could you please tell us what you think has happened here?”

“We believe this is one of many recent acts of vandalism around the city,” the commissioner says, his voice loud enough to mask the sound of The Riddler’s footsteps as he comes into the room, “somehow related to underground boxing clubs. We will be coordinating a rigorous investigation.” 

“That was Police Commissioner Loeb,” as a firefighter directs the reporter away from the building, she continues to speak without any trouble, “who just arrived on the scene here of a four-alarm fire that broke out about an hour ago.” 

“Boy, she’s hot,” the redheaded boy says, leaning forward in his seat. Ed considers it for a moment, the woman’s long, blond hair, her neon smile, her big, blue eyes— it’s all too bright, for him. 

“Live, from the Parker Morris Building, we’ll be updating you on this story as it progresses,” the reporter says, pressing her finger to her earpiece, “back to you in the studio.” There’s more to be said, another recap of the story at hand, but the camera pans out to previously recorded footage of the damage on the building itself. There, on the side of the building, over the windows, is a gigantic, neon-green smiley face, with two burning offices serving as the eyes. The men in the room burst into laughter, into exclamations of excitement, and Ed strains to hear. 

“Holy shit,” he says, unheard over the sounds of laughter. “What the _fuck_ did you guys do?” The men are hesitant, before they start laughing again, thinking that maybe he’s only toying with them. As his expression grows darker, the laughter stops, and Butch finally speaks up. 

“Sir,” and the term of respect sounds so strange on his tongue, “the first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions, sir.” 

Ed looks to The Riddler, he looks into the doorway that leads into the kitchen, and isn’t met with any form of explanation. The Riddler smiles at him, sunglasses still on in the dim lighting of the house, and walks away. 

At an event being held by the city in order to bring attention to new anti-crime initiatives, a man holds court of several minimally interested socialites and businesspeople; “The victory in the war against crime will not come overnight,” he says, voice practiced and calculated, and only a touch louder than the din of the room, “it will take dedication and commitment, and most of all, cooperation. The streets are safer now. There’s hope in the inner city.” If anything he’s saying has merit, it’s unclear to those listening. On either side of his podium, several officials whisper amongst themselves. 

“I gotta take a piss,” one of the men— Police Commissioner Loeb —says, patting the shoulder of the man next to him as he stands up. 

“These are the first steps in a long journey. That is why we have created Project Hope—“ as the speaker’s voice drones on, the waitstaff in the room springs to life. 

“Butch,” one of them says, nodding as Loeb leaves through a side door, in search of a bathroom. Butch follows, and Ed looks on in confusion, making a conscious effort to follow the rest of the waitstaff as they leave the room. 

Several men in white waiter suits follow Loeb down the hallway, just enough steps behind him that he doesn’t notice them. He pushes the bathroom door open, and The Riddler is on the other side, cigarette hanging from his mouth. In a single movement, he grabs Loeb by the jacket, and hauls him into the bathroom— the waitstaff, all Project Mayhem members, rush the bathroom. The Riddler brings Loeb to the ground, wraps his tie around his neck and uses it to haul him deeper and deeper into the bathroom. When he yells, The Riddler pops him in the nose. Every member of Project Mayhem that comes into the bathroom pulls a mask over their faces, despite already having been seen. Ed follows up the crowd, locks the door behind them. 

As The Riddler wraps duct tape around the man’s mouth, he nods at Butch and the rubber band in his hands. “Wrap it around the top of his Hacky Sack, Butch,” he says, smirking as various hands pull Loeb’s pants off. 

“Man,” Butch says, rubber band snapping, “his balls are ice cold.” Somewhere in the crowd of men, there comes a raucous laugh that dissolves into giggles. 

“Hi,” The Riddler says, leaning over Loeb’s head and into his line of vision. “You’re gonna call off your rigorous investigation. You’re gonna publicly state that there is no underground group, or—“ he nods at the crowd of men behind him, “these guys are gonna take your balls.” Someone beside The Riddler shows off a large knife, and as the Commissioner tries to speak around the tape on his mouth, Ed looks on, horrified. “They’re gonna send one to the New York Times and one to the L.A. Times, press-release style.” One of the men places the knife against Loeb’s balls, sharp point resting just beneath the rubber band that’s been wrapped around them, “Look,” ashing his cigarette offside, The Riddler blows smoke in Loeb’s face, “the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep.” The Riddler gets up in Loeb’s face, unpleasantly close, so much so that he can smell the cigarette on The Riddler’s breath, “Do _not_ fuck with us.” Loeb nods, understanding, and The Riddler bounces back onto the balls of his feet. The man with the knife drags it over Loeb’s skin, as he begs and begs, only to break the rubber band. 

“Fooled ya,” the redhead from the porch says, grinning so widely that it makes his ski-mask fit strangely— he throws the rubber band in the Loeb’s face. 

The entire crew runs out of the back door of the convention center, some of them changing clothes while the others simply ditch their ties and jackets. The Riddler has his sunglasses on again, because of course he does, and Ed can barely hear him over the sound of the blood rushing in his skull. Ed watches, blood boiling, as The Riddler holds the sides of the redhead’s face, ruffling his hair enthusiastically. “Butch, you’re this way,” The Riddler says, and as everyone else runs, Ed stands still and _glares_ at the redhead. 

_I am Jack's inflamed sense of rejection._

Back at the bar, in the basement that Ed knows so well, he’s managed to tune out the sounds of the men around him, screaming and shouting. Instead, he’s entirely honed in on the boy across the ring from him, the redhead with eyebrows that match his hair color, a symmetrical face that wordlessly screams _Riddles likes me more!_  

The boy laughs as he fights, frantic and nervous because he’s fighting someone so much higher up on the food chain than he is. He gets a few good hits in; he punches Ed in the stomach, he punches Ed in the side of the head, and then he punches Ed square in the nose. When Ed pulls back, touches the blood in his mouth, the entire room shifts. He knocks the redhead down, punches him in the back of the head, and when he sits down on the boy’s chest, he refuses to stop. The boy’s hands are on him, patting at him desperately, some kind of attempt to stop him, but Ed keeps punching him. Blood is everywhere, splattering every time Ed punches the boy, and men that were cheering him on seconds ago are now gritting their teeth, looking away. 

The Riddler watches from the edge of the ring, arms folded, some unreadable emotion threatening to grace his features and break his usual mask of apathy. 

_I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species._

In the crowd, Butch watches in horror. Maybe the mild-mannered man that he thought he could confide in isn’t as kind as he thought he was. Butch doesn’t understand, can’t bring himself to wrap his mind around it, and as the crowd tightens up on the scene, Butch keeps himself out. Ed still hasn’t stopped punching.

_I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those French beaches I’d never see._

_I wanted to breathe smoke._

When Ed catches sight of The Riddler pulling his jacket on, he finally leans back from the boy’s face. His entire torso is spattered in blood, and then men around him look on in disgust. Ed rolls his shoulders, and gets up as if he’s done nothing wrong. 

“Where’d you go, psycho-boy?” The Riddler asks, standing by the stairs and lighting a cigarette.

“I felt like destroying something beautiful.” On the floor, the redhead coughs up his missing teeth, disrupting a dangerously wide gash in the side of his face— its as if the skin wants to come up off of his musculature. 

“If he weren’t bleeding, I bet Jerome’d be flattered,” he snarks, turning to follow Ed up the stairs. “Get him to a fuckin’ hospital.” 

“You got it,” a man in the crowd says, rushing into the circle as The Riddler leaves. 

As the two of them walk out into the pouring rain outside, a car pulls up in front of them. The man who emerges from the driver’s door looks like a corpse; pale skin, right side of his face covered in bruises, “Don’t worry, Mr. Riddler;” the man says, offering the open door, “airport parking, long term.”

“After you, Mr. Riddler,” Ed says bitterly, turning around to face him.

“After _you,”_ and at his insistence, Ed slides across the front seats, letting The Riddler get behind the wheel. “Something on your mind, dear?” He asks, once they’ve made it out of the parking lot and onto the road. 

“No,” Ed says quickly, only to turn to face The Riddler seconds later. “Alright, yeah. Why wasn’t I told about Project Mayhem?”

“First rule of Project Mayhem,” two men in the back seat speak in unison, and Ed wonders why he didn’t notice them sooner, “is you do not ask questions.” 

“What are you talking about?” The Riddler looks over at Ed, merging onto the highway.

“Why didn’t you include me in the beginning?” 

“Fight Club _was_ the beginning. Now it’s moved out of the basement,” rolling his eyes, The Riddler spends far too long with his eyes off of the road, “it’s called Project Mayhem.”

“You and I started Fight Club together,” Ed knows he’s whining, but he can’t help it. “Do you remember that? It’s as much mine as it is yours, you know!”

“Is this about you and me?”

“Yeah! I thought we were doing this _together_.”

“You’re missing the _point_. This does not belong to us. We are not special.”

“Fuck that! You should’ve told me!” And although Ed wants to scream, wants to sit down and cry because as a _child_ that was a working form of debate, but he sees headlights in the haze of rain in front of them; “Riddles!” With seconds to spare, The Riddler swerves out of the way, back into his own lane, “Goddamn it, Riddler!” 

“What do you want?” The Riddler is yelling, aggressive and loud, still not bothering to look at the road, “Statement of purpose? Should I e-mail you? Should I put this on your action item list?”

“Oh, look—“

“You decide your own level of involvement!”

“I will!” All of this hurts, and something disgusting is clenching inside of Ed’s chest, “I want to know certain things first.”

“The first rule of Project Mayhem—“ The men in the back seat aren’t anywhere near as confident as they were at the beginning of the ride.

“Shut _up_!” Ed sounds like his father, and he brings it down only marginally as he turns to look at The Riddler, “I want to know what you’re thinking.”

“Fuck what you know. You need to _forget_ what you know. That’s your problem.” As he turns up the windshield wipers, driving on toward the source of the thunder in the sky, The Riddler has found the perfect cadence to his anger, “Forget what you think you know about life, about friendship, and especially about you and me.”

“Wh— What?” Ed wants out. Ed is thirteen and being spat on by a boy twice his size in a hallway. Ed is fifteen and getting asked out by a girl as a joke; the whole class laughs as he tells her he’d like to go out with her. “What is that supposed to mean? What—“ Ed stammers on, only stopping when The Riddler lets the car coast over into the opposite lane, “What are you doing?”

“Guys, what will you wish you’d done before you die?” The Riddler asks, tipping his head into the back seat.

“Paint a self-portrait.”

“Build a house.”  

“Hey—“ he smacks Ed’s arm, surprisingly gentle, “And you?” A car horn blares in front of them. 

“I don’t know. Nothing. _Nothing_. Come on,” he reaches out for the steering wheel, “get in the right lane.”

“I have to know the answer to this question,” sounding like a child, The Riddler refuses to let go of the wheel. “If you were to die right now, how would you feel about your life?”

“I don’t know!” Ed is on the verge of tears, and his voice shows it desperately, “I wouldn’t feel anything good about my life! Is that what you want to hear me say? Fine! Come on, just get _over_!”

“Not good enough,” The Riddler grips the wheel firmly, stares right into Ed’s foggy, rain covered glasses.

“Stop fucking around!” When the car in front of them is suddenly too close, suddenly right there and unable to stop in the slick of the road, Ed throws himself to the other side of the cabin, “Riddler!” And The Riddler drives on, unrelenting, making the cars in the oncoming lane swerve around him; Ed curls up in a ball in the seat, wondering if it’s too late to put on a seatbelt. “Jesus fucking Christ! Goddamn it! _Goddamn it!_ Fuck you! Fuck Fight Club! Fuck Oswald! I am _sick_ of all of your shit!” The outburst leaves Ed shaking, his glasses now missing in the floorboards of the car; he’s crying, just a little.

“Okay, man. Okay.” The Riddler drops the wheel, hands folded up in his lap. 

“Quit screwing around,” reaching out, Ed holds the wheel loosely, “take the wheel.”

“Look at you.”

“Take the wheel, alright?”

“Look at you! You’re fuckin’ pathetic!”

“Why? Why? What are you _talking_ about?” 

“Why do you think I blew up your condo?” His voice isn’t as loud as it was before, but The Riddler’s words still seem to echo in the cabin of this borrowed car. 

“What?”

The men in the back seat share a look, a confused expression, a shift of the eyes that reads; _What exactly did I get myself into?_  

“Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat,” The Riddler flicks his wet hair back, out of his eyes, “it’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just _let go_.” Cars pass them, fast and whipping water up off of the asphalt, “Let go!”

“Alright,” it’s weak, sad and ultimately defeated, but Ed sags back into the passenger seat, “fine.”

“Fine.” With the wheel no longer being controlled, the car slowly coasts from one side of the road to the next, picking up speed. The Riddler reaches across his torso, pulling the seatbelt over him— Ed mirrors the action, and the men in the back seat do, too.

Ahead of them, there’s a car idling on the shoulder, hood open. Flares in the road get driven over, and The Riddler never lets up on the gas. Their car makes contact with the idle one, sending both vehicles down the slope of the highway, out of sight and out of mind of the various drivers on the road. 

 _I’d never been in a car accident_.

The Riddler emerges from the car first, mostly unscathed, throwing himself over the flipped car to get to the passenger side. Slowly but surely, he pulls Ed out of the wreckage, nearly dropping him into the wet grass. 

_This must have been what all those people felt like before I filed them as statistics in my reports._

“Goddamn,” The Riddler says, holding Ed’s bloody body in his lap, carefully wiping some blood away from his eye. “We just had a near-life experience!” 

After the accident, the universe seems to take pity on Ed, allowing him a chance to sleep well for the first time in weeks. Maybe The Riddler has medicated him, or maybe it’s just the exhaustion. “In the world I see,” The Riddler tells him, sitting on the floor next to his bed, more speaking _at_ him than _to_ him, “you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the rich, thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower,” Ed can see The Riddler in silhouette only, wringing his hands, “and when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty carpool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” The Riddler looks at Ed, stares at his half-conscious body, and finally stands up. He puts his coat on, doesn’t bother to dust the mold from the walls off of his back, and Ed pathetically reaches out to him. “Feel better, champ,” he tells Ed, reaching down and ruffling his hair, then disappearing out of his bedroom door. 

Ed wakes up to silence. 

_And then—_

“Riddles?”

_The Riddler was gone._

Ed walks to The Riddler’s bedroom, finds his bed covered in paperwork and maps, airline tickets sit in perfect organization on the floor, in front of blueprints for something Ed has never seen before. 

_Was I asleep?_

When Ed closes The Riddler’s bedroom door, the various drivers licenses hung on the back rattle. _Human Sacrifices_ , the label over them says, and Ed doesn’t remember a single one of them, except for the first. 

_Had I slept?_

Downstairs, Ed slides through his home like a mouse, mostly unseen. 

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake,” a man regurgitates The Riddler’s words to another, not really doing the speech justice, “you understand me?”

_The house had become a living thing, wet inside from so many people sweating and breathing._

“We are all part of the same compost heap, people!” The man continues, turning toward the kitchen full of bodies. 

_So many people moving, the house moved. Planet Riddler. I had to hug the walls; trapped inside this clockwork of space monkeys._

“You can’t be smoking in here,” a man in a vest berates a boy in front of him, dropping a cigarette to the floor and stomping it out. “Do you know how much ether we have in this fucking house?” Ed resists the urge to answer down to the decimal. 

_Cooking and working and sleeping in teams._

Ed walks into an office, suddenly very aware of how sloppy he looks in his boxers, his stained t-shirt and ancient robe. The men in the office all wear matching black, t-shirts and pants, heads shaved and work boots spit-shined. 

“Hang on a second,” a man says into the phone connected to his head, “I’ll have to call you right back. Yeah.”

The windows are pasted with paperwork, less organized than The Riddler’s room— it’s as if the room itself is its own living, breathing collage piece. Folders on the wall say “Misinformation” and “Mischief” but when Ed goes to reach for them, someone walks in front of him. He soldiers on. More folders, now labelled by address, and when Ed goes to grab one, a chemical burned hand stops him. 

“It’s under control, sir,” and it’s Jerome, face crudely stapled back on, creating a disgusting scar that curves from the crown of his forehead to the underside of his chin. The skin around one of his eyes has healed poorly, like hamburger meat pressed beneath flesh-colored saran wrap— Ed can’t look at him for long. 

“Where’s The Riddler?” Ed asks, because of course this brown-noser should know.

“Sir,” his voice isn’t as childish as Ed remembers it being, now it’s gravelly and harsh, “the first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask—“

“Right, uh,” making a gesture of zipping his lips, he turns around and tosses the imaginary key, “okay.” 

In the kitchen, as men cut and wrap individual bars of soap, Ed steals a bottle of vodka off of the counter. Nobody stops him.

_My father dumped me. The Riddler dumped me._

Ed makes rounds throughout the house, drinks most of the bottle of vodka, and finds himself in the backyard garden as the sun goes down, guided around by the little spotlight lanterns that the workers have put up around the planting beds. Men still work, even now, and Ed appreciates the sound they add to the otherwise silent evening. 

_I am Jack’s broken heart._

_What comes next in Project Mayhem, only The Riddler knows._

_The second rule is you do not ask questions._

He’s drunk, Ed know he is, but that doesn’t stop him from being irrational. As a man tries to rake his footsteps out of the rocks, Ed shakes the open bottle at him, “Get the fuck away from me,” his voice is barely clear enough to be understood, words slurred. “Get the fuck away from me!” The man finally backs away.

“Who are all these people?” Oswald looks like he’s put on weight, and Ed wonders just why Oswald is even _here._ He hopes he didn’t call him. The crickets around them are so loud, working in unison to inform the world of the arrival of night— Oswald looks like a safe haven, like a sliver of light from shuttered windows. Ed stares at him, vodka in one hand, cigarette hanging limply from his mouth. 

“Paper Street Soap Company,” he says, proudly, stumbling as he walks. 

“Can I come in?” Ed feels hope. Ed feels a terrible, hopeful warmth in his chest, and he smothers it with a sip of vodka. 

“He’s not here.”

“What?”

“ _Riddler_ isn’t here,” it seems like Oswald has walked all the way here, from the shiver in his leg and the disarray of his hair. There are circles under his eyes, not the makeup he usually smears there, and from this level of closeness Ed can see every dangerously long eyelash as it flutters over his cheeks. “Riddler went away. Riddler’s gone.” Instead of responding to him, Oswald takes three measured steps back, pulls in a slow breath, and walks away. Faintly, Ed wonders what Oswald came there wanting in the first place. 

When Oswald looks back, just one small little glance, Ed feels sadness start to creep into the edges of his heart. If only, just once, he could say the right thing. If only The Riddler were here, ready to whisper the right words into his ear, to tell him what he should say to keep Oswald from looking at him like _that_. 

Ed pitches the bottle of vodka to the ground, and before he can decide what his _next_ self-destructive behavior should be, he hears screaming inside the house.  He follows everyone inside, watches as people clear the soap and chemicals off of the table, dropping a body on top of it. 

“Got two gunshot wounds, comin’ through! Clear some room!” One man shoulders another man’s weight, letting him hop on one leg as his other leg drips blood onto the floor.

“What happened?” Ed feels like Jesus at the Last Supper, standing on one side of the table, hands outstretched, and yet _nobody_ is speaking to him directly. “What happened?”

 “We were on assignment,” the man with the bleeding leg says, hissing as someone wraps gauze around his wounds. “We were supposed to kill two birds with one stone— Destroy a piece of corporate art and trash a franchise coffee bar.” 

Somewhere, in the mass of whispering, shaking men, someone says, “Operation Latte Thunder.” Ed lets the shitty name slide. 

“We had it all worked out, sir,” gunshot wound says, “it went smooth until—“

“What?” The way the man hesitates makes Ed’s anxiety peak.

“They shot Butch.” He groans, squeezing his leg even tighter against the pain, “They shot him in the head.” 

“Those fucking pigs!” The boy wrapping his leg whines, hands shaking as he comes down from the adrenaline high. 

Horrified, Ed pulls the hood off of Butch’s head and is greeted with nothing but blood and bone shards. Substance dribbles off of the table and onto the floor, far too liquid for anyone’s liking. “Oh, god,” Ed gags, turns his head to the ceiling and breathes in clean air, before looking back. He can see where the bullet pushed out through the front of Butch’s skull, a single pinpoint with shatter lines spreading away from it— Butch’s eyes have bugged out of their sockets slightly, not enough disruption in the pressure to displace them, but they don’t look right anymore. His brain is soup, dripping, dripping, dripping— Ed thinks he might vomit, but he swallows it down. 

“Those motherfuckers!” Makeshift nurse is overtaken by anger, and when Jerome comes up on the scene, even he’s horrified. He takes over for the angry boy, tying gauze. 

“You morons,” Ed says, voice unpleasantly level. “You’re running around in ski masks, trying to blow things up! What did you _think_ was going to happen? Do any of you think?” Nobody answers, because everyone knows the answer. Ed stares down at the man who he considered a friend, and he can’t help but blame himself. It was apparent from the start that Butch was never meant for this— if it hadn’t been for him, explaining the rules to Butch, sheltering him subtly, Butch would never have been in this situation to begin with.

“Okay, quick,” says the man with the shot-through leg. “We gotta get rid of the evidence! We gotta get rid of this body.”

“Bury him,” Jerome says.

“What?” With Butch’s blood on his hands, Ed considers choking Jerome to death.

“Take him to the garden and bury him.” When nobody sparks into action, Jerome claps his hands loudly, “Come on, people! Let’s go!” Immediately, hands start reaching out toward Butch’s limp body. 

“Get your fucking hands off—“ Ed slaps hands away, his voice going so high that it screeches, “Get away from him! What are you talking about? This isn’t a fucking piece of evidence, this is a person!” For some of the men around him, this is the first time they’ve ever heard Ed speak, the first time they’ve ever _seen_ him, especially like this. The alcohol is still running through his blood, turning his intense emotion into tears, into anger, into centralized _hate_ that he has nowhere to guide. “He’s a friend of mine, and you’re not gonna bury him in the fucking garden.”

“He was killed serving Project Mayhem, sir,” when Jerome argues, Ed wishes soundly that it had been Jerome who was shot. 

“This is _Butch_ ,” Ed says weakly, hands planted on the man’s stomach.

“But, sir, in— in Project Mayhem,” in the crowd, Ed can’t see exactly whose voice he’s hearing, but he’s just thankful it isn’t Jerome’s, or the asshat who got shot in the leg, “we have no names.” 

“No, you listen to me,” Ed wags a finger at the men around him. “This is a man, and he has a name. And it’s Butch Gilzean, okay?”

“Butch Gilzean?” 

“He’s a man, and he’s dead now,” his voice wavers, and Ed wishes he could paint the walls with Butch’s blood and skull fragments, just to make a point, “because of us, alright? Do you understand that?” 

“I understand,” gunshot wound is talking again, and _god_ Ed wishes he weren’t. “In death, a member of Project Mayhem _has_ a name. His name is Butch Gilzean.” 

“His name is Butch Gilzean.” 

“His name is Butch Gilzean,” and suddenly everyone is chanting, everyone is talking in unison, and Ed hates it.

“Come on, guys,” he begs, lifting his head off of Butch’s stomach, “please, stop it.” None of them hear him, none of them care; “Shut up! This is over, this is done with!” As the chanting gets louder, as Ed starts to wonder just how many voices are echoing around him, he’s struck with a single thought— “I have to find The Riddler.” 

Ed hauls up the stairs, into the office the two of them shared, and he starts to search through the drawers. He finds airline ticket after airline ticket, and he swears some of these are from swaths of time he can’t even remember. Every ticket has The Riddler’s name on it; Ed fails to find one with his own name. 

The phone rings, a terrible, old school thing sitting on the floor, and Ed scrambles to pick it up. “Riddler?” He asks, as soon as he has the receiver to his head. 

“No, this is Detective Essen of the arson unit. I need to see you in my office—“ Ed slams the phone down, and next thing he knows, he’s in an airplane. He hauls himself over the railings of ramps, skipping lines and running; he didn’t bring any baggage with him, only one carry-on he doesn’t have to worry about losing. 

_I went to all the cities on The Riddler’s used ticket stubs, barhopping. I didn’t know how or why, but I could look at fifty different bars, and somehow I just knew._

“I’m looking for The Riddler,” Ed says, looking at a beat up man behind a bar, “it’s very important that I talk to him.” 

“I wish I could help you,” the barkeeper says, shrugging casually, “ _sir.”_ Punctuating himself with a wink, the man leaves Ed’s mind spinning. 

_Every city I went to, as soon as I set foot off the plane, I knew a Fight Club was close._

In a laundromat, in the middle of some city that Ed can’t even remember the name of, he struggles with the man behind a cash register, “Look at my face,” he tells the man, “I’m a _member._ I just need to know if you’ve seen The Riddler.”

“I’m not exposed to…” the man seems aware that what he’s saying makes no sense, but he continues on, “speak any such information to you, nor would I, even if I had said information you want at this juncture, be able.” 

“You’re a moron,” Ed says incredulously, turning on his heel to leave the store. 

“I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.” 

_The Riddler had been busy, setting up franchises all over the country._

In the back of a taxi, Ed watches as he sees a group of men fighting on a street corner. He can hear the screaming, the hooting and hollering, and he just knows this isn’t any other fight— it’s a club. 

_Was I asleep?_

Ed wakes up in another taxi, in another city, and sees another club of men fighting on another street corner. 

_Had I slept?_

_Is The Riddler my bad dream, or am I his?_

“We’ve just heard the stories,” two men sit opposite of Ed in a diner, both of their faces mottled with bruise and peppered with butterfly bandages.

“What kind of stories?”

“Like nobody knows what he looks like,” one says, leaning over his warm cup of coffee.

“He has facial reconstructive surgery every three years,” the other man has to talk more carefully, lest he open up his busted lip.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ed tells them, but they don’t hear him. They don’t care to.

“Is it true about Fight Club in Bludhaven?”

“Is The Riddler building an army?”

Ed falls asleep that night, and wakes up on the escalator at an airport. He’s not even surprised anymore. 

 _I was living in a state of perpetual déjà vu. Everywhere I went, I felt I’d already been there. It was like following an invisible man. The smell of dried blood. Dirty, bare footprints circling each other. That aroma of old sweat, like fried chicken. The feel of a floor still warm from a fight the night before. I was always just one step behind The Riddler_.

Ed walks through a bar in the midday, careful of the floors as they’re being mopped, careful of the chairs sat up on the tables. He hears a haunting chant, and when he focuses in on it, he comes up on men in a kitchen; “His name is Butch Gilzean. His name is Butch Gilzean. His name—“ Ed’s arrival silences them.

“Welcome back, sir,” the barkeeper says, and when Ed turns to see him, the man’s head is in a brace. Despite it, he still works to clean glasses, as if it were any other day. Talk about commitment. “How have you been?”

“Do you know me?” 

“Is this a test, sir?” 

“No,” Ed says in earnest, “this is not a test.” 

“You were in here last Thursday,” the barkeeper tells him, shining another glass and hanging it up on the rack above the bar. 

“Thursday?” 

“You were standing exactly where you are now, asking how good security is.” When the man straightens up proudly, it sounds as though the brace on his skull squeaks subtly, “It’s tight as a drum, sir.” 

“Who do you think I am?” Ed asks, taking two steps toward the bar. 

“Are you sure this isn’t a test?” 

“No, this is not a test.” 

“You’re The Riddler,” the barkeeper tells him, facial expression carefully measured as he lifts his hand to show off a puckered scar. “You’re the one who gave me this.” 

_Please return your seat backs to their full, upright and locked position._

It’s a wonder how Ed makes it back to his hotel room, and once he gets to the phone, he’s dialing frantically. On the other end, the voice is annoyed and gravelly. 

“Yeah?”

“Oswald, it’s me,” he says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Have we ever done it?”

“Done what?” 

“Have we ever had sex?” 

“What kind of stupid question is that?” 

“Is it stupid because the answer’s yes, or because the answer’s no?”

“Is this a trick?”

“No, Oswald, I need to know—“

“You mean you want to know if I think we were just having sex, or making love?”

“So we did make love.” 

“Is that what you’re calling it?”

“Just answer the question, Oswald, please! Did we do it, or not?”

“You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me! You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is that a pretty accurate description of our relationship, Riddler?” 

_We have just lost cabin pressure._

“What did you just say?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“What did you just call me? Say my name.”

“Riddles. Riddler. The _fucking_ Riddler, you freak! What’s going _on_? I’m coming over.”

“No, wait, Oswald, I’m not there—“ but Oswald has already hung up. 

From the corner of the hotel room, in the single, lonely armchair they provide, The Riddler is there. “You broke your promise.” 

“Jesus, Riddler.”

“You fuckin’ talked to him about me,” The Riddler looks different, no longer dressed up perfectly in his favorite green suit, or his series of Hawaiian tourist style shirts; instead he’s halfway dressed, button up shirt stained and untucked from his slacks. 

“Riddler,” Ed realizes he’s shaking, and he wonders just how pathetic that makes him look, “what the fuck is going on here?” 

“I ask you for one thing— one simple thing.”

“Why do people think that I’m you?” The Riddler levels him with a tired expression, eyes hidden by his sunglasses. “Answer me!” 

“Sit,” is all he says, and Ed listens.

“Now answer me. Why do people think that I’m you?”

“I think you know,” he says, putting a cigarette in his mouth. 

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. Why would _anyone_ possibly confuse you with me?”

“I— I don’t know.” Something flashes in Ed’s mind’s eye, he sees himself hauling Commissioner Loeb into the bathroom by the lapels, and as soon as it appears, it’s gone. He stares at The Riddler, mortified, and The Riddler stares right back, like the abyss itself.

“You got it.”

“No.” Ed sees himself, head ducked into the Commissioner’s line of sight; _Do not fuck with us._ He sees the words coming out of his own mouth. 

“Say it.” 

“Because—“ Ed sees himself sitting at the table in the kitchen, shaking with the sheer force of the pain that’s being brought on by the chemical burn he’s giving himself. 

“Say it!” 

“Because we’re the same person.” 

“That’s right.” 

“Riddler, I don’t understand this,” and that’s so terrifying for Ed to say, because he’s always thought himself a person smart enough to understand what’s happening around him.

“You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be? That’s me.” The Riddler taps the ash out of his cigarette, into a novelty ash tray, “I look like you wanna look. I fuck like you wanna fuck. I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not. I’m not afraid to admit to what I want, I’m not limiting my mind by the rules of the law— I’m you, but so much better.”

“Oh, no.” Ed sees himself telling Oswald that The Riddler is gone, and now he understands why Oswald was so confused, so horrified. “This is impossible.” 

“No,” The Riddler croons, leaning forward.

“This is crazy.”

“People do it every day,” he explains, smiling. “They talk to themselves. They see themselves as they’d like to be. They don’t have the courage you have to just run with it.” Everything shifts, looking on from true omniscience, and Ed is sitting in his hotel room, staring at an empty chair with rapt attention. Ed is rolling around in a parking lot, beating himself up. “Naturally, you’re still wrestling with it, so sometimes you’re still you.” Ed is sitting on a curbside, offering a bottle of beer up to a person who isn’t there, dropping it and not realizing it’s shattering. “Other times, you imagine yourself watching me.” Ed is standing at the head of the circle in the basement, back home, telling fifty-something men the rules of Fight Club. “Little by little, you’re just letting yourself become The Riddler.” Ed is standing on top of the Parker Morris building, dressed in all black and smeared with green paint, as he yells down at the men repelling down the side of the building. 

“No,” Ed says, shaking his head, “you have a house.”

“Rented in your name.” 

“You have jobs. You have a whole life.”

“ _You_ have night jobs, because you can’t sleep. Or, you stay up and make soap.”

“Oswald— you’re fucking Oswald, Riddler.” 

“Uh, technically, _you’re_ fucking Oswald. But it’s all the same to him.” Ed sees himself on top of Oswald, sees every pale inch of Oswald’s skin, sees his faded tattoos, his freckles, his faint bone outlines. 

“Oh, my god.” 

“Now you see our dilemma,” The Riddler leans back, tapping more ash off of his cigarette. “He knows too much. I think we’re gonna have to talk about how this might compromise our goals.”

“Wh—what are you talking about?” Slowly, Ed stands up from the bed and starts inching backward, “This is bullshit. I’m not listening to this. You are _insane_.”

“No, you’re insane. And _we_ simply do not have time for this crap.”

Ed’s sight goes dark before he hits the bed, but he can faintly feel the mattress springs creak and shift to accept his weight. 

_It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _in the riddler we trusted_
> 
> finale tomorrow! i guess i should have scheduled this so the finale comes out on the weekend, instead of starting it on the weekend and ending it on a fucking tuesday but... oh well. planning has never been one of my strong suits. 
> 
> talk to me on tumblr! i'm [ mayor-crumblepot ](https://mayor-crumblepot.tumblr.com)


	5. Chapter 5

When he wakes up, Ed is curled up in the fetal position, with the phone off the hook right next to him. He immediately grabs his bag and starts running, bolting through the lobby. 

“Sir!” The woman behind the counter stops him, and his shoes squeak on the tile. “Are you checking out?”

“Yeah,” Ed wants to keep going, but he’s trapped by convention, “um, bill me, please.” 

“I need you to initial this list of phone calls, please,” and she produces a long list of calls, managing to continue to be polite even as Ed grabs the sheet from her. 

“When were these made?” 

“It says right there, sir,” she points to the paper, to the proper column. “Between two and three-thirty this morning.”

“No, I was—“ Ed comes to a realization, right in front of this poor woman, and he simply initials the sheet and runs off. 

_Have I been going to bed earlier every night?_

_Have I been sleeping later?_

Ed busts into the house on Paper Street, having only slept blinks on the airplane and taxi rides. He expects there to be people, but there’s nothing. The house looks just as bad as the first night he’d been into it, empty, and unloved. 

_Have I been The Riddler longer and longer?_

“Is anybody here?” Ed asks, stumbling down the basement stairs. Where he expects to see bunk beds, maybe showing any sign of previous life, he instead sees bathtubs full of pipes and tanks. He remembers The Riddler telling him _with enough soap, one could blow up almost anything,_ and suddenly, there’s fear coursing through him. “Oh, my god.”

_Déjà vu all over again._

Ed starts poring over the phone numbers on the list the woman at the hotel provided him, and he finds that they all coincide with the maintenance departments of the addresses that are on the folders in the office. 

“1888 Franklin,” the man on the phone says, sounding bored, “maintenance.”

“I need to speak to your supervisor,” Ed says, looking at the corresponding folder on the wall. 

“Speaking.”

“I think something really terrible is about to happen at your building. You have _got_ —“ 

“It’s under control, sir.” 

“Excuse me?” Ed can smell his own nervous sweat.

“Don’t worry about us, sir. We’re solid.” 

Ed takes every folder off of the wall, tucks them under his arm, and runs outside to catch a taxi. When he makes it into the city, he’s lucky enough to drive by Oswald’s apartment building as he comes walking out. “Oswald! Oswald, wait! Holy fuck,” he says, stepping out of the open taxi door before the car has even stopped, “Oswald! I gotta talk to you, Oswald!” 

“Your whacked-out, bald freaks hit me with a fucking broom!” Oswald screams, even though Ed is now right in front of him. “They almost broke my arm!” 

“I’m sorry, I— I tried to warn you, but—“ 

“They were burning their fingertips with lye! The stink was unbelievable.” 

“Look— Look, listen,” he reaches out for Oswald’s arm, and isn’t surprised when the other man tries to shake him off. “It’s gonna take a tremendous act of faith on your part, but you’ve got to hear me out.”

“Oh, here comes an avalanche of bullshit,” and he marches off, leaving Ed to take a deep breath and then follow.

“A little more faith than that!” Ed follows Oswald into a diner, sitting down across from him. 

“No, listen,” Oswald keeps his voice low, hushed, “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”

“You have every right to be—“ There’s a waiter standing there, hovering over the two of them. “Um,” Ed bites his tongue, chews on it, “I’ll just have a coffee, thanks.”

“Sir,” the waiter says, voice extremely telling, “anything you order is free of charge, sir.” 

“Why is it free of charge?” Oswald asks, immediately critical. 

“Don’t— Don’t ask.” 

“Whatever.” Leaning back in his seat, Oswald peeks over the waiter’s shoulder to see the menu on the wall. “In that case, I’ll have the clam chowder, the fried chicken with the backed potato with everything, and a chocolate chiffon pie. And a coffee.” 

As the waiter walks away, Ed reaches out to stop him, “Clean food, please.”

“In that case, sir,” the waiter sags downward, speaking more quietly into Ed’s ear, “may I advise the gentleman against the clam chowder.” 

“No clam chowder,” Ed manages a smile, so thankful that he remembered to ask, “thank you.” When he looks out toward the kitchen, Ed realizes that every single chef has stopped to smile and nod at him. Christ. 

“You’ve got about thirty seconds,” Oswald says, finally taking off his sunglasses. 

“Oswald,” his voice is softer, more nervous than he’s ever been around Oswald before, “I know that I’ve been acting very, very strange. Okay? I know that it’s got to seem like there’s two sides to me when you’re around me.”

“Two sides? You’re Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Jackass.”

“I deserved that,” Ed can’t help but laugh, just a bit, because Oswald’s wit is remarkable, “but— I’ve come to realize something very, very important.” 

“What?”

“The full extent of our relationship wasn’t really clear to me up until now, for reasons I’m not gonna go into, but the important thing is I know that I haven’t been treating you so nice.” 

“Yeah,” Oswald looks like he wants to believe Ed, but he ultimately fixes his hair and reaches for his backpack, “whatever.” 

“No, no,” Ed reaches out, takes hold of Oswald’s hands on either side of the table and holds them down weakly, “fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds, please. Fifteen seconds, don’t open your mouth or move.” And even though Oswald rolls his eyes, he settles back into his seat. “I’m trying to tell you that I’m sorry. Because what I’ve come to realize is that I really like you, Oswald.” 

“You do?” It’s the same softness in his eyes as when he looked at their shared reflection in his apartment, trusting and almost sweet. Ed likes that look a lot more than he likes the venomous glare Oswald tends to use on him. 

“I really do.” Ed knows that he isn’t very good at this, at talking about his feelings, but he wants to try, for Oswald. “I care about you, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you because of me. Oswald, your life is in danger.” 

“What?” And it’s deadpan again, closed off by a steel wall. 

“You need to leave town for a while. Get out of any major city and just go camping or something.” 

“You’re an insane person. Do I _look_ like I go camping?” 

“No, no. I’ve involved you in something terrible that’s about to happen.” 

“No.”

“You’re not _safe,_ Oswald—“

“Shut up!” Everyone turns to look at them, silencing the entire restaurant, and Oswald fidgets with the tableware under the attention. “Listen. I tried, Rids,” Ed’s chest clenches at the nickname, at the realization that Oswald cared for The Riddler enough to give him a nickname, “I really tried.”

“I know you did.” 

“There are things about you I like,” he can’t bring himself to smile, but he does meet Ed’s eyes, and that’s a start. “You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re spectacular in bed. But, you’re intolerable. You have _very_ serious emotional problems. Deep-seated problems for which you should seek professional help.”

“I know,” Ed says, running a hand through his hair, “and I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you’re sorry, I’m sorry, everyone’s sorry. But— I can’t do this anymore.” Oswald sounds like he might cry, and _god,_ Ed hates it. Ed hates it, he wishes he could do something to make this better but he understands, now he finally understands, that this is his fault. “I can’t. And I won’t. I’m gone.” 

“Yes, okay, but you can’t just _leave_ , Oswald,” Ed follows Oswald out of the restaurant and onto the street, making as little of a scene as possible, “you’re not safe. Oswald, wait, you don’t understand!” 

“Leave me alone,” Oswald says, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Oswald, I am trying to _protect_ you!”

“Just go away! Let go of me! I don’t ever want to see you again!” 

“That’s _fine_ ,” Ed says, because he needs it to be, “If that’s what it takes— Here, just wait. Wait right here,” and he steps out into the street, right in front of a bus, willing it to stop. “Hold it right there, please,” he tells the driver through the open door, and when a car stops because he’s in the way, Ed simply points a finger at it, “Shut up! _Shut_ up!” He walks back up to Oswald, fishing around in his pockets and pulls out a wad of cash. “Here. Take this money, and get on this bus. I promise you I will never bother you again, if that’s what you want.” The car honks again, and Ed spins on his heels to face them again, “Shut up!” Turning back to Oswald, it’s surprising how quickly he can change his tone of voice. “Please get on the bus, Oswald. Please.” 

Oswald takes the money, walking up to the bus and stopping just short, “Why are you doing this?”

“Because they think you’re some kind of a threat,” Ed doesn’t turn around to look at Oswald, and the cars around them just keep honking, “I— I can’t explain it right now. Please, just trust me. If I see where you’re going, you won’t be safe.”

“I’m not paying this back,” Oswald says, looking at the money in his hands, “I consider it asshole tax!” 

“That’s fine. Remember, stay out of major cities for at least a couple days, okay?” 

From the top of the bus steps, Oswald looks out at Ed, “Riddler?” Ed turns his head, and he immediately wishes he hadn’t, because he can see that Oswald’s crying, “You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.” And the door shuts on him. 

Ed runs to the police station, drops his files onto the countertop, and looks at the officer sat behind it. “Hello,” he says, politely, “I need you to arrest me. I am the leader of a terrorist organization responsible for numerous acts of vandalism and assault all over this city.” 

In an interrogation room, Ed explains the details of every folder he has with him. The same detective assigned to his arson case sits on the opposite side of the table from him, a young detective with a good heart; she wants to accept everything Ed says, immediately, but she knows better. Three other officers stand around the room, and when Essen leaves, officers A, B, and C look at Ed knowingly. 

“I really admire what you’re doing,” A says, stepping toward the table.

“What?”

“You’re a brave man to order this.”

“You’re a genius, sir,” officer C sits backwards in a chair, closest to Ed.

“You said,” B walks up to the table, planting his hands onto it firmly, “if anyone ever interferes with Project Mayhem— even you —we gotta get his balls.”

Ed stands up, defensively holding his hands over his lap, “No.”

“It’s useless to fight.”

“This really is a powerful gesture, Mr. Riddler.”

“It’ll set quite an example.” 

“You’re making a big mistake, fellas,” Ed tries to bargain, but he’s aware he’s cornered.

“You said you’d say that.”

“I’m not The Riddler!” He tries, backing up against the wall.

“You told us you’d say that, too.”

“Alright,” straightening up, Ed tries to channel the kind of confidence he imagines he exudes when he _is_ The Riddler, “I am The Riddler. Listen to me. I’m giving you a direct order. We are aborting this mission right now.”

“You said you would definitely say that.” 

It was worth a shot. Desperately, Ed lunges for the door, but he’s quickly caught. “Let me go!” The officers haul him up on the table, slamming him down and trying to keep his legs under control. “Are you out of your fucking minds? You’re police officers!” Officer B manages to pull Ed’s pants off, leaving him in his boxers, and Ed starts _screaming_. “No! No—“

“Is somebody timing this?” Officer A laughs, smirking from Ed’s left side as officer B pulls out his knife. And someone knocks on the door. “Keep your mouth _shut_.” 

Officer B walks up to the door, and has a short conversation with Detective Essen, before leaving the room. “Hey, wait!” Ed tries, as soon as the door has shut, but officers A and C have him pinned. 

“Sir, we have to do this.”

“Come on, Mr. Riddler. Stop fighting.” 

The officers squabble with each other, clearly not very well practiced, and Ed takes this opportunity to grab a gun off of officer C’s belt. “Drop that knife!” He says, rolling off of the table gracelessly, “Back up. Face down, on the floor! Both of you, right now!” Quickly, Ed reaches out and takes his folders back, bundling them up into his arms. He peeks out the door, prepared to escape, “First person out this door gets a— a— gets a lead salad, you understand?” And he _runs_. He takes a back escalator down, running out into the street in his boxers, dodging oncoming traffic. When cars come too close to him, he points the gun at them, getting just enough space between them so that he can escape. 

_I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more._

Ed comes up on the Franklin Street address, a hulking credit union with modern design, simple and functional like the Ikea furniture Ed used to own. Foolishly, he tugs on the front door, unsurprised to find it locked. 

“What are you doing?” Ed turns around to see The Riddler, and even though he knows he isn’t real, Ed points the gun at him. “Running around in your underpants? Man, you look like a crazy person.” 

“No, I’m on to you,” walking away from the door, Ed pushes past The Riddler and toward a metal bench, “I know what’s going on.”

“Well, come on, then. I got us a great place to watch from.” As Ed pushes the bench toward the glass door, The Riddler speaks over the screeching sound of metal on the ground, “It’ll be like pay-per-view!” The bench hits the door, and also the door frame, stopping fast and knocking the air right out of Ed. Suddenly, The Riddler is on the other side of the glass door, laughing at him. 

Ed holds the gun up, pointing it square at The Riddler’s head. He shoots twice; The Riddler disappears, and the glass shatters. Ed kicks it, and the entire thing falls like a sheet, giving Ed space to crawl in. He goes down into the garage, where he finds a single white van, sitting right between two structural beams. Of course. He never has been subtle. 

When Ed opens up the back of the van, he sees jugs upon jugs, all connected together by wires, hooked up to one single box. When he opens it up, there’s a timer, and it’s _beeping_. “Oh, Christ.” 

“Now what are you doing?” The Riddler asks, standing outside of the van. 

“I’m stopping this.” 

“Why?” The Riddler lights a cigarette, and it terrifies Ed, but then he remembers that The Riddler isn’t real, and he’s got much _bigger_ problems at hand. “It’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done, man.” 

“No, I can’t let this happen.” 

“You know there are ten other bombs in ten other buildings, right?” 

“Goddamn it,” Ed turns around glaring at The Riddler, “since when is Project Mayhem about murder?” 

“The buildings are empty. Security and maintenance? They’re all our people. We’re not killing anyone! We’re setting them free.” 

“Butch is dead! They shot him in the _head_.” 

“You wanna make an omelet,” The Riddler rolls his eyes, but even his face reads as faux confidence— he hadn’t expected that, “you gotta break some eggs.” 

“No, I’m not listening to you.” Ed turns back to the bomb, looking down at the various wires, “You’re not even there.” When he goes to lift the timer, The Riddler coughs loudly. 

“Wouldn’t do that. Not unless I knew which wires were what.” 

“If you know, then I know.” Focusing deeply, Ed feels one wire from the side of the timer, all the way down and through, until— The Riddler appears in the front seat.

“Or maybe I knew you’d know, so I spent the whole day thinking about the wrong ones!” Ed puts a hand in The Riddler’s face, then goes back to focusing on the bomb in front of him. He looks at where the wires meet the timer, where they meet the fuel, where they meet the detonator. He makes a decision. “You think?” Ed reaches for the wire, despite the sound of The Riddler’s voice. “Oh, heavens no. Not the green one,” but Ed commits, wrapping his fingers around the green wire. “Pull any one but the green one.” When Ed pulls the green wire, the timer stops. The timer stops, and nothing happens— no explosion, no fire, nothing. “I asked you not to do that.” 

The Riddler punches Ed in the face so hard that he rolls out of the back of the van. Ed holds his gun up at The Riddler, hands shaking, “Get away from the van!” The Riddler closes the back doors, breaks the key off in the lock and throws the remaining keys aside; “Riddler, I’m not kidding! Get away from the van!” When he feels like he has nothing else to do, Ed shoots. Ed shoots right through the back window, through the cabin, and out the front window of the van. 

“Whoa!” The Riddler whips around dramatically, gesturing with his arms, “Whoa!” He runs hands through his hair, making a mess of himself. “Okay! You are now firing a gun at your imaginary friend near four-hundred gallons of nitroglycerin!” Faintly, as The Riddler advances on Ed, Ed wonders why The Riddler cares so damn much if Ed lives or dies. The Riddler isn’t real, he has nothing to gain or lose, and Ed likes to think it’s because The Riddler cares for him. That probably isn’t it, though.

“Riddler,” Ed says, backing up as The Riddler comes at him, “Riddler, come on, stop!” He shoots again, right into The Riddler’s chest, and the both of them share a moment of pause. Of course there’s no blood. In anger, The Riddler just shouts. 

He knocks the gun out of Ed’s hand, then punches him right in the nose. Then, he punches Ed in the chest, pushing him back into the cement wall, knocking the air out of him. The air that Ed manages to pull into his lungs, around the blood in his mouth, comes through in wheezes, and when he can get up on his feet, he runs away. 

“Aw, come on,” The Riddler says, gesturing widely with his arms. “Don’t go!” 

When Ed runs around a corner, The Riddler is there, arm outstretched to clothesline him. It gets Ed right in the throat, leaving him choking. The Riddler throws him into a parking ticket machine, then he throws him into the parking attendant booth, breaking the glass with the weight of Ed’s body. Ed crawls out the other side, moving to crawl under a car, but he isn’t fast enough. The Riddler grabs him by the ankles, hauling him out, and when a shoe pops off in The Riddler’s hands, he uses it as a weapon. When Ed gets away, he crawls up and over the back of a truck, taking a metal wire and whipping it at The Riddler, as if it were a warning. It doesn’t do anything to dissuade him, and The Riddler quickly slams Ed up against the wall, then throws him into the truck’s side mirror.  Even though the mirror shatters, The Riddler still takes a moment to check his reflection in the remains, preening. Ed tries to crawl away, but The Riddler grabs him by the hair and drags him all the way to the stairwell door. He steps down on Ed’s ankle, pushing little shards of cement and glass into the skin with every twist of his loafers. Unceremoniously, he grabs Ed and throws him down the stairs, watching him fall until he lands at the bottom. Ed blacks out, but stays conscious _just_ long enough to see The Riddler walk away. 

And he wakes up in the penthouse, with a gun in his mouth. He tries to enjoy the view, but he can’t see past the gun and the man holding it. “Three minutes. This is _it_ ,” The Riddler says, with his sleeves rolled up and his hair brushed back, “the beginning. Ground zero.”

_I think this is about where we came in._

“Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?” 

Ed tries, but ultimately fails, to speak around the metal in his mouth.

“I’m sorry?” The Riddler pulls the gun back, frowning.

“I still can’t think of anything,” Ed says sheepishly. 

“Ah,” walking away, The Riddler makes a lap around the penthouse, “flashback humor. Clever.” He leans up against the window, looking out at the peaceful city below, “It’s getting exciting, now. Two and a half,” he puts his watch back in his pocket, turning to look at Ed, collapsed in his desk chair. “Think of everything we’ve accomplished, man! Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history,” enthusiastically, The Riddler walks up to Ed and spins the chair, whipping Ed around so that he can look out at the city. “One step closer to economic equilibrium.” The Riddler pushes the chair at the windows, and when Ed hits it, he feels pain in every part of his body. Goddamn. 

Looking out, Ed wants to concede that the scene itself is beautiful. Gotham has always been a pretty city, even if it wasn’t a nice one. Before he can say so, Ed sees a bus drive up, stopping at a corner that doesn’t have a bus stop. He can hear Oswald’s screaming all the way up here, cutting through the quiet of the night. 

“Why is he here?” Ed asks, looking at The Riddler with unmasked concern.

“Tying up loose ends.” 

Down in the street, all it takes is five men to lift Oswald up and carry him. “Put me down you bald-headed fucks!” It’s funny, how even when he thinks he’s in danger, Oswald doesn’t stop spitting insults. Ed likes that, his tenacity. 

“I’m begging you,” and he really is, Ed’s wavering voice proves it, “please don’t do this.”

“I’m not doing this,” The Riddler says, matter of factly. “ _We_ are doing this. This is what we want.” 

“No, I don’t want this.” 

“Right, except _you_ is meaningless now. We have to forget about you.” 

“Jesus,” Ed says, reaching up and holding his forehead. “You’re just a voice in my head.”

“You’re a voice in mine.”

“You’re a fucking hallucination!” His voice breaks, fractures like glass against the floor, and he sounds like a child again, “Why can’t I get rid of you?” 

“You _need_ me.”

“No, I don’t. I really don’t, anymore.” 

“Hey, you created me. I didn’t create some loser alter ego to make _myself_ feel better.” The Riddler sits down on a step ladder, dropping the gun loudly, “Take some responsibility!”

“I do. I am responsible for all of it, and I accept that. So, please, I’m begging you— Please call this off.” 

The Riddler lights himself a cigarette, blowing smoke upward before he speaks, “Have I ever let us down?” Thunder rumbles overhead, a storm brewing close by, “How far have you come because of me?” Even The Riddler seems distressed, hands shaking, eyes wandering, “I will bring us through this. As always, I will carry you, kicking and screaming, and in the end, you will thank me.”

“Riddler,” Ed pulls himself toward The Riddler, chair wheels making obnoxious noise against the floor, “Riddler, I am grateful to you,” when he moves, his left leg drags behind him limply, “for everything you’ve done for me. But this is too much. I don’t want this. Please.” 

“What do you want?” The Riddler launches upright, gun in hand. “Want to go back to the shit job, fucking condo world, watching sitcoms? Fuck you! I won’t do it.” He throws the gun down on top of a rolling file cabinet, then rolls the thing into a better position before perching on top of it. 

“Oh, my god. This can’t be happening.” 

“It’s already done, so shut up.” In one hand, The Riddler holds his stopwatch, and in the other, he holds the gun firmly, “Sixty seconds. Can you see alright?” 

“No,” Ed mutters, looking at the floor, “I can figure this out. I can figure this out, this isn’t even real. You’re not real. That gun is—“ Staring at The Riddler, Ed focuses on the gun, how much he imagines it weighs, “That gun's in my hand.” When he looks down, he’s right. The gun is in his hand, hot metal against his palm. He looks at The Riddler incredulously, as if to say _look what I did!_

“Hey, good for you.” The Riddler breathes out smoke, “Doesn’t change a thing.” Wordlessly, Ed turns the gun upward, slowly, until the barrel touches the underneath of his chin. It fits there perfectly, and that unnerves Ed, only slightly. “Why do you want to put a gun to your head?” He asks tiredly. 

“Not my head, Riddler, _our_ head.” 

“Interesting,” The Riddler slides off of the filing cabinet, landing soundly on his feet as he walks up to Ed. “Where are you going with this, Ikea boy?” In lieu of an answer, Ed pulls back the hammer on the gun. “Hey, it’s you and me. Friends.” If this is The Riddler’s idea of talking someone down, he’s doing a piss poor job.

“Riddler,” Ed says, standing up slowly, balancing most of his weight on his unharmed leg, removing the gun from beneath his jaw for just a moment, “I want you to really listen to me.”

“Okay.” 

“My eyes are open,” and he sticks the gun in his mouth, unintentionally angling it, and shoots a bullet right through his cheek, metal grazing the hinge of his jaw. Everything tastes like campfire, and blood is pouring down his face. When he looks at The Riddler, Ed sees smoke coming out of his mouth, out of his nose, out from behind his head.

“What’s that smell?” And The Riddler drops, back of his head blown out like a gaping mouth, dripping viscera and smoke. 

The elevator dings. Elevator doors open, and the men inside are laughing, holding groceries and beer. “Where is everybody?” One of them asks, coming around the dividing wall and dropping the bags in his hands when he gets sight of Ed. “Mr. Riddler! Holy shit.”

Two more men come running up the stairs, stopping short at the sight of Ed, bloody, gun in his hand. “Are you, uh— Sir, are you— Are you alright?” 

“Oh, yeah,” Ed’s voice sounds like a blender trying to break up rocks, raspy and terrible, “I’m okay.” 

“You look terrible, sir. What happened?” 

“Oh, nothing. It’s no problem.” Holding his hand to the open wound on the side of his face, Ed is sure he looks awful. 

“No, no, sir, he’s not kidding. You look really awful. You need medical assistance,” another man rounds on Ed, trying to get a look at the damage. 

“I’m fine,” and when Ed speaks without his hand over the wound, the man beside him gags at the sight. Faintly, in the stairwell, Ed can hear Oswald screaming. “Look, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” As the men with Oswald come up, into the penthouse, Ed gestures at them vaguely, “Let him go, please.” 

“Christ almighty!” Oswald shouts, straightening his clothes out angrily. When he catches sight of Ed, backlit by city lights, he practically growls, “You.”

“Hi, Oswald,” Ed has managed to cough most of the bloody mucous out of his throat, leaving his voice nasally, but at least he doesn’t sound nightmarish. “Leave him with me,” he tells the men, gesturing at the bags on the floor, “and get your stuff. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Ed coughs, blood squirting out of the side of his face with the pressure, “I’m sure.” 

As then men start to file out, it seems as though Oswald has been building up his anger, like a tiny little pressure cooker. “You _fucker!”_ He advances on Ed, platform shoes clicking as he goes, “What kind of sick fucking game are you playing at, putting me on a fucking bus—“ Oswald stops, shoes squeaking, when he gets close enough to Ed. He sees the blood, the gaping hole on the side of his mouth, “Oh, my god, your face!” 

“Yeah, I know.” 

“What happened?”  

“Don’t ask.” When Ed speaks, it seems like it only makes everything worse, because Oswald gasps so harshly, it’s like he’s been struck. 

“You’re shot,” he says, mortified. 

“Yes, I’m shot.” Oswald reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a beanie, a knit hat that’s unfortunately white, and immediately presses it to the blood on Ed’s face. 

“I can’t believe he’s standing,” one of the men in the elevator says, looking out at Ed and Oswald. “He’s one tough motherfucker.” 

“Who did this?” Oswald sounds so gentle when he asks, one hand holding the beanie and the other hand holding the good side of Ed’s face. 

“I did, actually,” he wants to shrug, but his body just feels so tired. Ed leans into Oswald’s hand, grateful of the gentle touch. 

“You shot yourself?” 

“Yes, but it’s okay,” Ed says quickly, turning to get Oswald’s attention. “Oswald, look at me. I’m really okay. Trust me. Everything’s gonna be fine.” And he’s sure how strange it all must look, him standing there in a wrinkled shirt and his boxers, missing a single shoe, holding a stolen gun; but Oswald is still there, in his stupid fuzzy coat, in his dramatic platform shoes. When the buildings around them start to go down, Oswald takes two steps closer to Ed, and that’s enough for something warm to swell in his heart. 

_I am Jack’s hopeless romanticism._

“You met me at a very strange time in my life,” Ed says, reaching out to hold Oswald’s hand. Oswald takes it, squeezes firmly. 

“So,” Oswald says, his voice barely audible over the explosions, “what’s your real name, then? Riddler isn’t a name.”

“It’s Edward. Ed. Nygma.” He can’t remember the last time he told someone his name, the last time he looked someone in the eye and felt important enough to tell them his name. It feels good. 

“Well, Eddie,” the nickname makes Ed’s heart stutter, happiness welling up inside of him, “you kind of fucked up the skyline.” 

“Let me make it up to you?” 

“Sure thing,” Oswald leans over and presses a kiss to Ed’s good cheek, smiling. When Ed leans forward to do the same, Oswald stops him. “Don’t kiss me. Your face is _rough_.” 

And even though it hurts, Ed laughs. He laughs so hard that he chokes on his own blood, but that’s okay. Oswald is there with him. It’s just he and Oswald, no Riddler, no Project Mayhem, nothing. 

It’s going to be fine. For once in his life, Ed believes that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we did it, boys
> 
> fight club is, without a doubt, one of my favorite movies and books. not to sound like an emotionally stunted straight boy, or anything. there's something very intriguing about the bullshit that tyler spouts, and although i believe in literally none of it, it's still riveting to listen to. it's a satisfying experience, it's interesting, it's funny, it touches at something weak inside my heart, and i really didn't expect the "twist" the first time i watched it. so, it's always my go-to "cult" movie. right under rocky horror picture show, of course. 
> 
> anyway, thanks for riding this wave with me. i had so much fun working on this, and i'm glad that i get to share it with y'all now. 
> 
> talk to me on tumblr! i'm [ mayor-crumblepot ](https://mayor-crumblepot.tumblr.com)


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